In this week’s discussion, I’m returning to the subject of Internet Governance and how the Internet is starting to become a weapon in International games of control and manipulation.

Last week, I changed how I link to articles I’ve read to make them more obvious and provide a better link for you to read them. As a bonus, I think it looks better. I hope you do, too.

If you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you know that I have become evermore involved in Internet Governance, and I have even put myself out there to be part of the process that, in a small way, provides the guidance, structure and tools to run the Internet as an open, transparent and fair tool for all to use. This isn’t perfect, and those who are involved in Internet Governance would likely acknowledge that, but it is, at least, the best option we have currently. I was on the election list for the ARIN Advisory Council, and the results were announced while I was away. Unfortunately, I didn’t get elected, but I’ll definitely put my name in the hat again in the next cycle. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d do as well as I did, so that was a pleasant surprise.

The importance of good Internet Governance has become more critical, just as the rise of tech and the almost total inclusion of tech in every sphere of life takes hold. The more it is involved in our lives, the more important it becomes as a tool and, hence, the more important it is for it to be governed well.

This has not escaped government scrutiny and interest from around the world, with seemingly open states starting to try to wrestle control over this public infrastructure to impose their own will, with both good and bad intentions. We’ve seen the United Nations finally getting involved after years of leaving it to the ITU to deal with through the Global Digital Compact. The ITU mandate was woefully inadequate for what the Internet has become, with it no longer being a telecommunications network over which ISPs and telcos route data packets for a fee. The Internet is a place in the world —albeit virtual— where, without it, you can no longer adequately function in many societies in the world. Two-thirds of the world is connected to the Internet in one way or another, and although the growth rate seems to be slowing, it is projected that the rest of the world will be online at some point in the near future. It won’t be 100%; that is impossible, as there will always be a section of the population that will reject the technology, arguably wisely. I doubt that Internet adoption will reach above 80% in total, and I think that it will take at least a decade to get there.

_Source: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2024-deep-dive-the-state-of-internet-adoption

I think we’re heading into a critical phase of governance and the overall battle for control of the Internet. I’m deeply worried about organisations like Meta (see below) building infrastructure that they will inevitably use for their own purposes (be damned with the consequences) and the risk that brings for the world as governments become more entrenched in authoritarian ways. Mark Zuckerberg’s turn to the right and the sycophant-ing to the new Trump administration is the first sign of this. The Internet has too big of an influence on populations for governments and ultra-rich private firms with diminishing scruples to ignore. The “Splinternet” is already here, albeit limited in application. The worry is that states that elect authoritarians and increasingly extreme right-wing governments will default to control of the Internet, just as they controlled media in the past.

This is why we need to fight back, and fighting back is by seriously limiting your use and engagement on big tech platforms that don’t have your interests at heart. Building your own tools for publishing, discussion, and diversion on the Internet will be key to online freedom in the coming years. The recent case with Open AI, which was accused of stealing social media posts and discussions to train its models, shows how the creator and originator of the posts made on platforms like Twitter, Threads, and Instagram are owned by the platform and not the individual. Go out there and start a little blog. Spin up a small social web instance. Keep it small and manageable, and then federate so you can participate in other discussions. It is not even expensive or technically challenging anymore.

I was thinking about this after ICANN published a blog post entitled Who Runs the Internet? Misconceptions About ICANN. The post responded to an article on a Russian site that seemed to criticise ICANN, suggesting that it ran the Internet and, hence, that the Internet was under American control. The article clearly signalled renewed interest worldwide in wresting control of the infrastructure. This is not the only incident, and it won’t be the last, ensuring Internet Governance will be at the forefront of stability, democracy, and freedom in the near future.

What the Russian article did, however, highlight is that many, if not most, people have no idea how the Internet actually works and how it is run. This ignorance of the systems we rely on daily contributes to the decline in their openness as those with the finances, political power and a nefarious mindset start to position themselves in the debate, taking advantage of the general apathy and ignorance of the public. This may even contribute to the collapse of the Internet as we know it today, although that is a little way off for the moment. And despite me sounding overly dramatic, it doesn’t take long or much.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

From The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemmingway

I would add that we in the Caribbean are particularly at risk of the consequences of digital colonialism driven by rogue nation-states imposing their will on small territories without the resources or the organisation to defend the interests of an open Internet. There are even cases where governments in the region are toying with the idea of implementing restrictions on the Internet and freedom of expression through legislation. It’s a tricky one, and I don’t pretend to be a lawyer, but the slippery slope effect is often the case in situations like this, where initial legislation is the entry point for a much broader implementation in the future. That’s something we all need to look out for.

Upcoming topics and discussion

I haven’t forgotten about the topics I mentioned last week. I’m working on them, but I don’t have anything in a form that I can write about as yet. Soon come.

I’ve also been working on documenting and writing out the margin notes I’d made on two papers about tech and AI. These things take time, and I hope you can excuse me. If you’re interested, they are:

Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI

Analog Privilege

(I lead an exciting life 🤣)

Lastly, I still haven’t written my thoughts on Caribbean federated instances. It’s coming, I promise.

Reading

Meet the underpaid workers in Nairobi, Kenya, who power OpenAI

I’ve written about this here in the past, calling attention to the practice of exploitation that seems part and parcel of big tech these days. Now, the US investigative show 60 Minutes has done a program about the issue. Pivot to AI has a write-up about it.

Tether Has Become a Massive Money Laundering Tool for Mexican Drug Traffickers, Feds Say

This is another topic that I have been a long-term sceptic of. Rather than being a solution looking for a problem —which is exactly how I still feel about Blockchain— cryptocurrencies have found their problem and product-market fit. Crime. That and, er, destroying the planet.

Meta’s $10 Billion Plan to Build the World’s Largest Subsea Cable Network

I can’t think of another company that I would least like to build critical Internet infrastructure (Google?). They have shown us time and time again that they are not good Internet citizens and that their motivations are so misaligned to a peaceful world that we should take a serious look at whether or not we should allow them to do this. Poorly behaved citizens are generally excluded (generally temporarily) from society, so should Meta in the case of its flagrant poor behaviour. Should they be allowed to invest? Of course, but not allowed to own and control wholly.

OpenAI explores advertising as it steps up revenue drive (Paywalled)

ChatGPT is about to peddle shitty ads next to its statistically-generated falsehoods, misinterpretations, and the occasional decent paragraph if the FT is to be believed. What a time to be alive. 🤦‍♂️

Meet Emma: The German AI Travel Influencer Stirring Controversy

“How can a fake person in a fake place ‘inspire’ anyone to travel to a real place?” - Precisely. Please, I beg you, Caribbean tourism decision-makers, steer away from this, or at least put your personal wealth and reputation on the line if you truly believe this will produce any good for your destination.

This is POSSE post, federated to Mastodon. Have a great week.

I’m back after a much-needed short break where I travelled across the Atlantic Ocean approximately two and a half times. Did anything happen in the world while I was gone? 🤪

I was, however, dismayed and pretty offended by the recent comments from Emmanuel Macron (France’s President), who recently said that Haiti’s problems were the fault of Haitians. While any country is responsible for a number of its troubles —and believe me, France has its shit to deal with that it seems incapable of addressing adequately— the case of Haiti is an altogether different one. Macron’s comments were offensive because we know the real systemic causes of Haiti’s difficulties since its independence in 1804, only recognised in 1825. France imposed a “Freedom Reparations bill” that crippled the country financially and has only recently been fully paid off, to the tune of around 20 to 30 billion USD. The duplicitous and dishonest assessment of a country badly in need of help, not scorn, is just revolting. France owes Haiti an apology to start with; then, it needs to do something about the money it stole from the people it broke.

Today, I wanted to continue discussing the Social Web, federation and decentralisation. Let me know if you have any comments.

In tech news, there was a mass exodus from Twitter to Bluesky that hasn’t finished, as far as I can tell. For the uninitiated, Bluesky is a supposedly decentralised social media website born out of a project at Twitter a number of years ago to build a new protocol to supplant that of the existing Twitter eventually. That didn’t happen, and the project was spun off as its own entity, where it continued its development of the ATProto protocol and eventually provided its services to the general public. I opened an account a while back as it was still an invite-only project and didn’t think much of it. Now Bluesky has something in the order of 20 million users and is growing. It is on track to overtake Twitter itself. Bluesky is a faithful copy of Twitter, so If you used Twitter of old, you’d be right at home with Bluesky. For the moment, the site is fun, and there are a lot of interesting conversations being had, particularly since the journalists and other social commentators moved over since Twitter’s owner has finally revealed his true colours. I doubt this will last personally, as I’ve lived through this cycle a multitude of times. It first happened when I saw a large growth in the number of people frequenting one of the Usenet groups I was part of in the 90s. The sudden rise in population and the sudden rise in popularity of the group eventually destroyed it. The dynamic was never the same, and the sheer scale of the discussion outweighed any attempts at moderation and gentle cajoling to stay on track. It eventually became hostile and filled with insults and threats of violence and was never the same. I believe this is the fate that awaits Bluesky and any social network that is structured in the way it is. Which leads me to thoughts I have about its structure and why I think the above is the natural conclusion for social media as we know it.

I’ve talked about the “Social Web” and decentralisation at length in these articles and, more importantly, why I think they are the best hope we have yet for a more humane social experience on the Internet. Their very nature of being distributed, decentralised and hence not run by any one person, company or organisation makes them inherently resistant to shock and control by interests other than the users themselves. And it’s not just a lack of monetisation through the tokenisation and sale of your interactions, ultimately dehumanising you and your social groups, or is it the objectively stupid, racist and sexist moderation policies of a madman that would, under normal circumstances, be sectioned and sedated in a padded cell. No, it’s the fact that users who own and run the individual services —called instances— can de-federate other instances that are noxious or otherwise undesirable. There have been several examples of ultra-right-wing nazis starting decentralised systems on Mastodon, only to be choked off (figuratively speaking), making their particular brand of “daddy didn’t give me enough hugs” attention-seeking utterly neutralised. They were not shut down nor “cancelled” from the Internet, not at all. They were just shunned into shouting into the void, the same way the utter cranks shout into a void of onlookers (usually one or two) at Speaker’s Corner in London. Say what you want there; you have the right to do it. What you don’t have the right to is the mass reach of your inane or discriminatory drivel. (That, and a possible kicking from a member of the public offended at your crap). And that’s part of the point: consequences.

Anyway, Bluesky is not this. Bluesky is a sort of halfway house between a singularly controlled walled garden and a truly distributed and federated system like Mastodon. It goes some way toward solving the issue of centralisation without actually being a decentralised system. You can spin up your own hardware and relay connection to the system, but the hardware and bandwidth required are prohibitive for the vast majority of the population of the Internet. Their documentation acknowledges this:

The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service.

Quoting a quote from this very detailed blog about Bluesky:

When you build architecture that in theory anyone can participate in, but the barrier to entry is so high so that only those with the highest number of resources can participate, then you’ve still built a walled garden. – Morgan Lemmer-Webber

I’ve seen discussion of disk space requirements in the terabytes to multiples of terabytes, with that requirement increasing as more users join the site.

So, no, Bluesky is not decentralised nor a truly federated system, but it faithfully reproduces the Twitter-when-Twitter-was-good system, and for most people, that is good enough.

I’d like to see more feedback from the Caribbean about the use of these systems, particularly when it comes to political and socio-economic organisation. Who’s using them? Are they gaining traction? Do they provide a truly collaborative space to exchange ideas without fear of trolls, racists and other undesirables? I’d love to know. Any and all discussions will be strictly confidential unless you decide otherwise. Please reach out.

Upcoming discussions

I wanted to put a couple of bookmarks in here at this point as I don’t have the time to write much more today, but I want to expand on a couple of topics I’ve been looking into lately.

One is about foreign direct investment in the Caribbean and how we need to be vigilant and more demanding of real-world and useful outcomes. The angle of the piece is telling the story of a tragic, and in my mind, criminal outcome. When we’re talking about Blockchain, Defi, and other so-called Web3 investments, there is much to discuss and critique.

I’d also asked about federated instances in the Caribbean and if anyone had examples of such in the region. A guy in Guadeloupe reached out to me, and we chatted about it. I’m hoping to write a couple of words about that soon, too.

Reading

Six years of the GDPR: we won’t pay for our right to data protection

You know my feelings on invasive surveillance adtech, so I’m not going to beat that drum too much. Suffice it to point you to another very accessible article from Access Now. Please become more aware of what these companies are doing with data and the dangers that lie ahead that we have only started seeing.

LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem

LLMs are still the talk of the town, but mass deployment and inclusion in decision-making roles are still very risky prospects. They don’t reason, and they mathematically place words after each other. That’s it. No magic. This article explains it all.

 The Fediverse has empowered me to take back control from Big Tech. Now I want to help others do the same.

The article title says it all.

Escape from Twitter. The future of social media is decentralized

More on my topic in this newsletter. Heads up: You’ll need to use a translation tool unless you read Polish.

Watchdog finds AI tools can be used unlawfully to filter candidates by race, gender

Shocked, I tell you. I’m really shocked. FFS, why do we keep doing these things?

Written by hand, over several days of thinking, typing, editing, and then panicking to get the last paragraphs written at the last minute. Have a great week.

Last week was a shorter week than normal, as Friday the 1st of November is a bank holiday in France, and hence the island. In fact, we have both the 1st and the 2nd, a lot like in Mexico. Many businesses were open Saturday morning, though, and I’ll get to that a little later.

As you know if you read this regularly, I was on the electoral list for the ARIN Advisory Council. The votes are now closed, as of midnight on the 1st of November. Announcements will be made on (or possibly before) the 8th. I have no idea where I stand, but I would like to thank each one of you if you have either voted for me or endorsed me on the elections site.

This week will be a little shorter than normal too. I’d previously mentioned that I’ll be taking a little break to disconnect and relax a little. I can’t promise to not write something, but I doubt I’ll write some of the longer articles that I tend to do.

There’s no structure or particular message to today’s note, just something that has been on my mind and something I see cropping up in discussions, podcasts and other fora. It’s about a typically Internet conspiracy theory, but I think there are parallels, even examples in operation today. Read on to find out more.

PS. The subject merits a lot more discussion and research, but that’ll have to wait for another time.

I don’t know whether you have heard of Dead Internet Theory or not, but it is an interesting idea, if a little flawed, and conspiratorial in nature. The main idea is that the Internet is now mostly automated bots talking to automated bots that make and interact with automatically generated content, all backed by algorithmic control. And here’s the whacky part if the first wasn’t enough, to control the population and minimise organic human activity. This discussion has gained a lot of attention in tech circles, and even in the governance areas of the Internet.

For the record, I will state it clearly, I don’t believe it for a second. However, I do think there is merit in discussing it because from a macro perspective, what is happening in the online advertising worlds, looks eerily similar to the ideas put forward by this theory.

One reason I don’t believe it, is because, like all conspiracy theories, there isn’t a single person who has written an academic paper, book, or official manifesto outlining the theory at its inception. Quite the opposite, it was originally posted on a 4chan paranormal board. If that doesn’t spark scepticism, then I don’t know what would.

Anyway, back to online advertising.

What is becoming clear through legal cases, and what many of have observed for years, including the investigations done by the EU, is that more and more of the “content” for advertising is being driven by and created through automated systems, talking to other automated systems that place bids on placing ads on websites (although this is diminishing), Social Media (exploding), YouTube, that themselves are automated end-to-end until you see the ad on your Instagram feed. And according to Meta, specifically Mark Zuckerberg, this is about to get worse for those of you who choose to use their platforms.

Since Meta’s pivot (read panic) to the Metaverse, that has been nothing more than a money pit and has produced absolutely nothing of value or useful in innovation to the world. But the next high is coming from the irresistible crack cocaine that is Artificial Intelligence.

Well, according to Meta (via 404media), it’s about to get worse. More and more of the algorithmically controlled timeline will be created by bots, monetised by ad-placing bots, being viewed by (many) “click the ad” bots to defraud money on Instagram and the other digital surveillance and billboard machines they are.

Side Note: AI, Artificial Intelligence, is now the accepted term for what is actually Generative Artificial Intelligence, GenAI. I lost this battle a while ago, where I wanted to ensure we didn’t legitimise souped-up autocorrect machines with a branch of mathematics that is very intriguing.

There’s probably some nuance in law that makes this completely legal, but it certainly looks a lot like fraud, and the winner is always Meta and neither the consumer (submerged in auto-generated tripe covered in auto-generated ads) or the small business (paying increasingly for less and less to compete with automated machines that produce drivel, but thousands of times faster).

This is madness.

Have fun and have a great week.

The current climate on the island continued this week with several incidents of violence and general unrest. For me, I was pretty much holed up all week as a barricade in two areas persisted, and it was not practical to pass during the week. I could only get some provisions from the island’s commercial centre late Friday afternoon. Things seemed to have calmed down a little, but the tension is still palpable. All things considered, I should be able to get to my office this week.

Proving what we all learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home is an entirely viable option for knowledge work, if not for many professions. I don’t think it will ever entirely replace in-person work, but it is clearly an option for businesses that can and are able or willing to take that route. And I would add that it could enable many businesses within and outside the Caribbean to work with people in the region who are highly qualified and highly motivated to work but don’t get the opportunities due to the restrictive size of the markets here and the arcane visa rules, not to mention the dreadful transport links internally in the region. In fact, I personally know some people who work for businesses and clients outside the island, making a decent living. By living here, they become net investors in the local economy, and compared to those who are wrongly accused of contributing to the brain drain, their expertise is still available locally should the need arise. That, unfortunately, is a whole different discussion.

It won’t be easy, and it won’t necessarily be cheap for some organisations, but it does provide opportunities for workers who, for various reasons, might not be able to relocate and work in person on a larger continent.

This discussion merits much more research and analysis—something that goes beyond the throwaway half-studies—and opportunity studies that are more marketing than data —than we have previously seen. I hope to contribute to that one day.

The end of my week was taken up with a two-day conference with ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. ARIN, remember, is responsible for managing the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses we all use in North America and much of the Caribbean. I was once again a Fellow this time, my second and last time being one. I got to spend time with some of the ARIN staff to learn more about its functions and prepare for the upcoming policy discussions on the ticket during the two days, something I value and thank the ARIN staff for all their work and dedication to helping people like me get more involved.

I won’t do a conference report here just yet as I haven’t had time to consolidate and work on my notes. I have a last meeting with ARIN on Tuesday, and I’ll be writing a report for them soon. I’ll probably adapt that to include here.

I will, however, report that contrary to what you might think, policy discussion is dynamic, passionate and sometimes quite technical. There was one particular item on the list that garnered much discussion, a discussion that still hasn’t finished yet, about the initial allocation sizes of IPv4 addresses. If you want to know more, here is a link to all the information you need to read and analyse it. The TLDR is that there is currently a long waiting list for IPv4, something to the tune of 2-3 years (700+ requests), which is not viable for some businesses starting up or expanding. To deal with this, a reduced initial allocation size has been proposed in this policy amendment, with the primary aim of reducing the waiting list. As with most things in life, it isn’t quite that simple and undesirable side effects or unintended consequences may result. As such, this session was one of the most involved and animated discussions and took longer than initially allotted. A consensus will prevail eventually, but we are not there yet.

I look forward to seeing how it develops and offering comments where possible.

Source: [stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XQ

The three preceding days were dedicated to the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) meeting. I was working, so I didn’t get to spend much time on it, but I watched a presentation about the state of IPv6 deployment from Geoff Huston, which gave a lot of food for thought. A subsequent article in The Register summarised the talk very well. I haven’t checked to see if the slides are publicly available, so I can’t share them here until I check. It is best to look at the NANOG website to see if there are.

I’ll be spending some time watching the recordings, and I have downloaded pretty much all of the slides available during the three days.

Reading

With the workload and the current climate on the island, I haven’t had much time to read the articles in my queue. However, I have started to look at a recent (long) article called “Analog Privilege” by Maroussia Lévesque, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School. I’m only in a few pages, and there is so much to digest. It can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4528278

It’s part of a long-running theme about how the haves structure things to ensure they don’t have to follow the rules as the have-nots, particularly in the increasingly digitised world.

I’ve long written about the way online advertising is destroying lives and how SEO is essentially fraud, but it is hard to find people willing to speak up and actually show how that is. A recent blog post blew up, gaining a lot of attention on exactly this. Please read it if you are in any way using, relying on, or recommending online advertising systems from Google and Meta. It is not that long, and (unfortunately) it is written pretty much in the style that the SEO monster dictates (although I can forgive them for that).

Of note

A couple of weeks ago, I asked if there were any Fediverse instances in the Caribbean. I recently received an email from one such instance using Soapbox. Thank you for reaching out. I’m just getting my ducks in order, and I’d like to reach out for a discussion, if that is good for you? I’ll send an email soon.

I’ll be taking a break soon, and I hope to get through a lot of reading and note-taking. Forgive me if I skip a week or two over the coming weeks. Even my hyperactive brain needs a rest now and again.

⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ OH, before I forget. The ARIN elections are still on until the 1st of November. You still have time to write a quick endorsement for me here. It’s very quick and easy.

A BIG thank you to those who have submitted one 🙏

Have a great week.

It has been another week of tension on the island despite an accord being signed by several actors in the discussions. It wasn’t unanimous, meaning the conflict is not over. This will not be resolved until a much deeper discussion is had and a long-term plan is implemented. I’ll let you know how it goes.

There have been no Internet shutdowns so far, and I don’t expect that to happen in the current climate.

This week, I wanted to return to one of the subjects that really ticks me off on the Internet: advertising.

Again, for the record, I am not against advertising. I am against the advertising we have today on the Internet. It crossed a line several years ago and hasn’t been rained in yet. Is that about to change?

I hate online advertising. Or, if I’m being more accurate, I hate what online advertising has become.

It used to be useful. It used to let you know about new products and services without being egregious or overwhelming.

Then came that fateful first banner ad in October 1994 from none other than what became Wired Magazine. It was called HotWired then, back when the Internet was an accessory to a news or entertainment product that was still being printed on dead trees and shipped worldwide.

I was an avid Wired Magazine reader, finally finding a magazine that took the Internet seriously and provided some of the most thoughtful journalism around the Internet and tech-related events. I bought imports of the magazine from the US, as we had nothing comparable to that in the UK, where I lived at the time. Wired UK eventually came to our shores, but it was a pale imitation of the real thing, and, surprisingly for me, it didn’t share that many articles across publications.

Wired set up a digital offshoot of the magazine that ended up having more employees than the magazine proper. It was racking in 20 million dollars in revenue (peanuts compared to today’s standards, but enormous back then for an online business), and even started an online search engine called HotBot.

But the lure of advertising was too great to ignore, and it set in motion a race to the bottom that we haven’t finished yet. New regulations, particularly in the EU, might mean we don’t actually get to rock bottom, but we are pretty much there regardless.

As a side note, Wired magazine was also the online space where I first learnt about cookies and how they would transform the web into something useful. I’m still waiting. Push technology was another one, but that’s another discussion for another time.

It was inevitable that online advertising would become more and more invasive as the years rolled on, with new ad tech being developed at a frightening pace. Developments typically ran three times around the globe before regulation could get its shoes on. There is nothing sacred from advertisers these days: cookies, tracking pixels, cross-site cookies, third-party tracking cookies, GPS tracking, purchase history, browser history, and illicit screen captures of what you’re working on.

The problem is that together, this technology is not neutral, innocent, or safe for many people.

We’ve all heard the anecdote of the ‘grandfather to be’ being informed by a big chain store’s pharmacy before his daughter had the time to announce the news. The ending was happy in this instance, but imagine for a moment a much more sinister outcome, and there are plenty of examples of them, particularly suicide by vulnerable people being subjected to a barrage of unwanted algorithmically generated timelines.

I was reading an article about having a new, clean YouTube account that, within seven days of the users viewing a slightly right-wing video, the algorithm pushed the account deeper and deeper into the world of Neo-nazis, holocaust deniers, and the like. SEVEN. DAYS. Let that sink in.

But why is it this bad now?

It is all about incentives. Two organisations in the Internet space have shown that this makes a lot of money. A LOT OF MONEY. And clearly, money trumps everything else, even 43,000 lives in a genocide that took place in Myanmar, where Facebook are complicit in the promotion and propagation of hate speech and organisation discussions related to the operations carried out by the military.

The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a “determining role” in the Rohingya genocide. Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people. The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform “a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate”.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Criticism_and_controversies

Of the approximately one million civilians displaced and still stuck in abject conditions in Bangladesh, a few tens of thousands of children were hoping to get $1M to fund some limited and basic schooling —as asked for by aid agencies— and Zuckerberg told them to what amounts to “Fuck off”. They still haven’t fully acknowledged their part or made any reparations. Very much like colonialism, n’est pas? (Digital Colonialism is another subject I briefly discussed, and I would like to get into specifics and more details sometime).

It makes the old journalistic adage, “If it bleeds, it leads”, positively pedestrian in comparison.

Deep in this is an argument about platform neutrality, enshrined in US law and popularly known as Section 230. Section 230 essentially states that platforms cannot be held responsible for the content flowing through their dumb pipes. After all, it didn’t “produce” the content. It is a law that made sense when our timelines were something more akin to what I see when using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to check up on news articles, blogs and other media (even YouTube). But this is being called into question now, as it should be, because timelines are no longer chronological —without manipulation. They are all algorithmically generated now as “For You” tabs and are even starting to “generate” their own content using Generative AI. That last bit is important, as it, in my mind, unequivocally removes the protection from Section 230. I would argue that forcing unwanted and unasked-for content on a timeline does the same, i.e. if the timeline isn’t chronological (untouched), then it is curated, i.e. content. But that argument hasn’t been won as yet, despite several court cases currently being discussed.

I’ve seen arguments about IRL advertising, suggesting you can’t not see it or ask for it. Two things: 1) They don’t track your every move online or offline. 2)

Legislation has been enacted for many years in the EU, and it was recently strengthened with the Digital Services Act. Unlike the E-Commerce Directive, this act is a regulation and mandates states to implement it, thus harmonising regulation for its members.

Intermediaries (Facebook, ISPs, for example) and other intermediary services can be legally required to remove content should it be deemed more than just cached or conduit data (i.e. unaltered). Providers are exempt from liability:

the DSA establishes a broad liability exemption as long the providers are “in no way involved with the information transmitted.”

Source: https://digitalplanet.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/DD-Report_2-Christoph-Busch-11.30.22.pdf

In my view, these regulations don’t go far enough and only allow companies like Facebook et al. to continue their surveillance capitalism and profit on the attention economy to the loss of many, mostly those least able to afford such losses. At worst, they allow them to continue feeling genocides and driving the humanity out of the Internet.

In this world, truth is worthless, and lies are valuable.

I have discussed two separate topics: advertising and engagement content. The link, of course, is that the former is entirely responsible for the latter.

We can and should do something about it. I hinted about what to do a little earlier. 😉

I’ll save that for another time.

Reading

An article that popped up only today (Monday 21st October 2024) as I write this goes a long way to describing this feeling that I and many others are having.

More on the same subject from The Walrus.

One more for the road.

I have written this in a decidedly unalgorithmically-generated style from the deepest depths of my meatware. Have a great week.