Category Archives: Politics

Rule #1: stop tweeting. And if you must use Twitter, just lurk

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From Farhad Manjoo:

I’ve significantly cut back how much time I spend on Twitter, and — other than to self-servingly promote my articles and engage with my readers — I almost never tweet about the news anymore.

I began pulling back last year — not because I’m morally superior to other journalists but because I worried I was weaker.

I’ve been a Twitter addict since Twitter was founded. For years, I tweeted every ingenious and idiotic thought that came into my head, whenever, wherever; I tweeted from my wedding and during my kids’ births, and there was little more pleasing in life than hanging out on Twitter poring over hot news as it broke.

But Twitter is not that carefree clubhouse for journalism anymore. Instead it is the epicenter of a nonstop information war, an almost comically undermanaged gladiatorial arena where activists and disinformation artists and politicians and marketers gather to target and influence the wider media world.

And journalists should stop paying so much attention to what goes on in this toxic information sewer.

WhatsApp tries damage limitation

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This morning’s Observer column:

In the last two years, around two dozen people in India have been killed by lynch mobs inflamed by rumours on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging service owned by Facebook. WhatsApp has also been fingered for its role in other hateful or unsavoury episodes in Brazil and Pakistan. In each case, the accusation is essentially the same: disinformation and lies, often of an inflammatory kind, are effortlessly disseminated by WhatsApp and obviously believed by some of the recipients, who are thereby encouraged to do terrible things.

In terms of software architecture and interface design, WhatsApp is a lovely system, which is why it is a favourite of families, not to mention Westminster plotters, who are allegedly addicted to it. Its USP is that messages on the platform are encrypted end to end, which means that not even Facebook, the app’s owner, can read them. This is either a feature or a bug, depending on your point of view. If you’re a user, then it’s a feature because it guarantees that your deathless prose is impenetrable to snoopers; if you’re a spook or a cop, then it’s definitely a bug, because you can’t read the damned messages.

A few years ago, WhatsApp added a key new feature – an easy way to forward a message to multiple chat groups at once…

Read on

One reason why the Brexit referendum vote was inevitable

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Because the British First-Past-The-Post electoral system provides no safety valve for dissatisfied or disaffected voters. As Andrew Gamble points out in a seminal article on “The Realignment of British Politics in the Wake of Brexit”:

Other third parties have had bursts of success, but have not been able to break the stranglehold of the two main parties. The most recent example is UKIP. Despite its success in winning more seats in the European Parliament than any other party, and winning four million votes in the 2015 general election, it only won one Westminster seat, and that was a seat held by a Conservative defector. If seats had been allocated proportionally in 2015, UKIP could have expected to win more than eighty. The main impact of third parties has been to reshape the policies, leadership and electoral strategies of the two main parties, rather than to replace them. Could Brexit change this?

Four million votes — and one MP.

Trump meets his match on social media

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Interesting column by Jack Shafer on Politico:

Setting aside for a moment the fact that Trump and Ocasio-Cortez don’t agree on anything, the two New Yorkers with Queens connections have a lot in common. Both made their political marks as outsiders, collapsing traditional power structures from within to become political celebrities. Both ran thrifty campaigns, substituting news coverage for advertising. Trump proved at the ballot box that Republican voters held no real allegiance among to the usual conservative stands on trade, immigration and foreign policy. Ocasio-Cortez likewise toppled a tenured insider, Joe Crowley, in a primary by catching him coasting.

Both command Twitter brigades in the millions—Ocasio-Cortez 2.63 million (up from 379,000 in July) and Trump 57.7 million—and use their audiences to delight their friends and aggravate their enemies. Ensconced in Washington, the pair has sustained their newsworthiness by jousting against their opposition and their putative allies, and this tension adds to their media appeal. On any given day, there are probably as many high-ranking members of their own party gunning for them as high rankers from the other side of the aisle. From mid-December to mid-January, reported Axios, Ocasio-Cortez generated 14 million interactions (retweets plus likes), twice as many as Sen. Kamala Harris, and almost six times as many as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer. To give you a sense of scale, CNN generated only 3 million interactions in the interval.

He also reveals something interesting about Trump — that he immediately spotted the significance of AOC:

Last August, Trump told Bloomberg News of his first encounter with her in his usual rambling style, and it’s unusually flattering:

“So I’m watching television, and I see this young woman on television. I say, ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Oh, she’s campaigning against Joe.’

“You know who Joe is, right? So Queens. Crowley. So I say, ‘Ah, let me just watch her for a second’— wonderful thing, TiVo. So you go back —‘huh, tell him he’s going to lose.’”

As they say, it takes one to know one.

Quote of the Day

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“Too much is at stake, especially for those who don’t live in the wealthier parts of white America, to let our technological world to become merely a shopping mall where we buy things and exchange half-truths.”

Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Foreword to The End of Trust.

The perniciousness of ‘personalisation’

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Interesting Scientific American article by Brett Frischmann and Devan Desai on how — paradoxically — personalised stimuli can produce homogenous responses:

This personalized-input-to-homogenous-output (“PIHO”) dynamic is quite common in the digital networked environment. What type of homogenous output would digital tech companies like to produce? Often, companies describe their objective as “engagement,” and that sounds quite nice, as if users are participating actively in very important activities. But what they mean is much narrower. Engagement usually refers to a narrow set of practices that generate data and revenues for the company, directly or via its network of side agreements with advertisers, data brokers, app developers, AI trainers, governments and so on.

For example, Facebook offers highly personalized services on a platform optimized to produce and reinforce a set of simple responses — scrolling the feed, clicking an ad, posting content, liking or sharing a post. These actions generate data, ad revenue, and sustained attention. It’s not that people always perform the same action; that degree of homogeneity and social control is neither necessary for Facebook’s interests nor our concerns. Rather, for many people much of the time, patterns of behavior conform to “engagement” scripts engineered by Facebook.

The point about what the companies actually regard as ‘user engagement’ is a useful reminder of how tech companies have become consummately adept at Orwellian doublespeak and euphemism. “In our time”, Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language”, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Well, in our time, we have strategic euphemisms like “the sharing economy”, “user engagement” and “connecting people”.

Onwards!

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There’s nothing quite like a “strong and stable” leader for helping one jump off a cliff. This is the cartoon in today’s Financial Times.

So, referendum results are sacred? Except when they’re not

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Wow! Here, courtesy of the Economist, is something I hadn’t remembered:

A second issue is the nature of British democracy, and in particular how badly equipped it is to cope with referendums. Other countries that use them, such as Switzerland or Ireland, have constitutional provisions laying down when and how to do so. But the unwritten British constitution confers total sovereignty on Parliament, as the epitome of a representative rather than a direct democracy. This sits uncomfortably with the notion of asking voters to make policy choices, as David Cameron did when putting Britain’s EU membership to a referendum in June 2016.

Despite this, Britain has in recent years made extensive use of referendums. Indeed, if one includes regional ones, in the past 20 years it has had more of them than it has had general elections. But the idea that they can settle contentious issues has been repeatedly disproved. The 1975 referendum on membership of the European Economic Community produced a decisive two-to-one result for staying in. Yet within eight years the Labour Party promised to pull out of the EEC without even consulting voters again.

A more recent example is more embarrassing for Mrs May. This week she argued that the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum must be honoured by all, because a 1997 referendum narrowly backing the creation of a Welsh assembly had been similarly accepted. Yet this overlooked the awkward truth that, along with her Tory colleagues, she had voted against the assembly, despite the referendum. What’s more, eight years later the Tories were campaigning for a second referendum with the option of overturning the result of the first—something she has explicitly ruled out for Brexit.

The end of The End of History man?

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From a scarifying review by Stephen Holmes of Francis Fukuyama’s new book, Identity: the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment:

Fukuyama is right to reject criticism that his first book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), was an expression of liberal triumphalism. Its gloomy insistence on the spiritual meaninglessness likely to befall late capitalist societies, in which atheist consumers have nothing serious to live for, rules out such breezy optimism. But he did imply, paradoxically, that after the wholly unanticipated collapse of communism there would be no more surprises about “the default form of government for much of the world, at least in aspiration.” What he now sees, but could not have foreseen at the time, was that the high tide of liberal democracy would last a mere fifteen years: “Beginning in the mid-2000s, the momentum toward an increasingly open and liberal world order began to falter, then went into reverse.” Identity politics, he has now concluded, explains why liberal democracy has ceased to impress much of the world as the ideal form of political and social organization.

Fukuyama’s analysis, says Holmes,

is flawed in several ways. Three decades ago, he argued that the human desire for respect and recognition was the driving force behind the universal embrace of liberal democracy. Today, he depicts the human desire for respect and recognition as the driving force behind the repudiation of liberal democracy. The reader’s hope for some account, or even mention, of this extraordinary volte face goes unfulfilled. Nor does Fukuyama squarely address the impossibility of explaining recent ups and downs in the prestige of liberal democracy by invoking an eternal longing of the human soul. What’s more, he fails to consider the possibility that after 1989 the obligation for ex-Communist countries to imitate the West, which was how his End-of-History thesis was put into practice, might itself have been experienced in countries like Hungary and Poland as a source of humiliation and subordination destined to excite antiliberal resentment and an aggressive reassertion of nationalism.

Wow! Great review..