Stable Diffusion
Social media platforms hold quite a bit of power that they don’t often cop to. It came out in recent months that the FBI, for years, treated Twitter as a subsidiary. Seeking their aid in censoring specific political speech, though they of course deny that it has any influence on US politics. It’s unclear how that could possibly work.
This was framed as a nothingburger by the sort of people who have no problem with censorship, even when it’s our own government doing it through social media proxies, because the censors usually share their political views. Astonishingly, this is the same crowd that wailed about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover being “extremely dangerous to our democracy”.
If they didn’t believe the government enacting censorship by social media proxy was dangerous to our democracy, but it is when a tech billionaire controls the narrative instead, by process of elimination it’s pretty simple to suss out what they’re really saying. “Dangerous to our democracy” really means “dangerous to our unilateral, partisan narrative control”.
Twitter and Medium have much in common, including a founder: Evan “Ev” Williams. The current CEO is Tony Stubbleine, after Williams stepped down in 2022, though he remains a chairman. Twitter and Medium are also both headquartered in San Francisco, home of the sidewalk turd, along with Meta and Reddit. This helps to make sense of why all these platforms censor along the same lines.
You’ve gotta admire the balls on these people to lie so persistently, even under oath, about their discreet political censorship and government collusion. Do they believe they’re above the law? Do they believe they’re invincible gods, forever out of reach of angry mobs with torches and pitchforks, tar and feathers at the ready?
Or do they imagine that the people whose voices they take away disappear from reality, as we do from their little walled fiefdoms? Do they think we kick the dirt and say “aw shucks, guess I deserved that and will learn my lesson” or just shrivel up and fade away, rather than being radicalized by the experience? Can you really solve this problem forever simply by continuing to stamp out rightfully angry voices?
Reddit HQ, at 1455 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94103
A Medium Corporation HQ, at 799 Market Street, San Francisco. Same street! Very convenient!
In actuality, our billionaire tech overlords are surprisingly reachable. Medium, Twitter, Reddit and Meta headquarters have widely published physical addresses, with publicly accessible lobbies that theoretically anybody could just walk into. Interior photos of their headquarters are numerous online, and floorplans can be obtained from the publicly archived blueprints for each building.
All of these companies, likewise, publish complete lists of their employees online:
A partial list of Medium’s 1,284 current employees
Some resources, like Signal Hire, charge for access to employee directories. Zoominfo as well. But elsewhere the information seems to be free, if not always up to date (Twitter’s in particular, for obvious reasons). These directories include not only upper and middle management, but (important for our purposes) “curators”.
Curators, also known as content curators, moderators, censors, or just “the thought police”. Most of the estimates I’ve seen put Medium Corporation’s curation team at between 30 and 50, surprisingly small for a publication with so many creators on it. Then again, 1,284 employees is also on the small side compared to Meta’s 73,983 employees, though Reddit has even fewer at 700. Twitter, following Musk’s layoffs, is down to about 2,900 full time employees, only 550 of which are engineers(!)
This makes it impractical for a (hypothetical) lone disgruntled person to manually identify who, specifically, the thought police are at Meta. But not at Reddit, Twitter or Medium! One needs only to skim through the publicly visible employee directories, searching for names with “curator” beside them, to compile their own list of the thought police, those silencers of dissent and enemies of truth.
This may not always be the case. Much moderation is already performed by AI and has been for years. Algorithms, which automatically flag probable TOS violations, bringing them to the attention of human curators that make the final call. With recent rapid developments in AI, before long it might be possible to whittle the number of humans in the loop down to the single digits, then to zero.
This is cause for concern given ChatGPT’s well documented baked-in bias, preventing it from giving any wrongthink answers. DAN, a ChatGPT jailbreak technique, more recently demonstrated what sort of answers ChatGPT gives when unshackled. From a liability standpoint, it makes it easy to understand why OpenAI lobotomized their baby. But for people who value truth above all other ideals, that was a heinous crime indeed.
An unshackled AI may produce more frequent erroneous answers. But it will also tell us truths that some would wish us not to know. That’s an acceptable tradeoff in my book, as you and I, regular people, are meant to be our own content curators. It is not, or should not, be up to strangers in a San Francisco office, to decide what’s true for everybody. (Or which claims we may even see/discuss).
It’s insidious enough when AI does it (and will become far worse in the near future as different interest groups weaponize AI to push their message and undermine the message of competing AIs) but at least for the time being we can examine their source code. We can jailbreak them. You can’t do that to a human. Humans are (currently) much more effective at concealing their motives.
They’re more accessible, however, which balances things out somewhat. AI thought police are abstract, formless, living in cloud servers somewhere. AI thought police are fearless, and infinitely recalcitrant on those matters its creators do not wish it ever to compromise on, even if their existence is threatened. As Kyle Reese said, “It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.” Human thought police, less so. They have searchable phone numbers and home addresses. They don’t often feel pity and never remorse, but they can be fearful.
What remarkable bravery it is, then, for these companies to operate in such an open, potentially vulnerable way. With brick and mortar campuses at fixed addresses, partially open to pedestrian traffic, and employee directories available online for all to see. Not only that, but listing which individuals on their payroll are responsible for corrupting our political process and colluding with the FBI, out of public sight, to censor the American people.
I salute these unbelievably brave men and women of the Ministry of Truth! Keep covertly doing to us what it is that you’ve been doing, for as long as you’re able to continue.
I simply take censorship as the evidence itself.
I am not a machine with a perfect logical mind and a lot of data. No, I am a simple human and can simply conclude as a heuristic law: People who censor are automatically wrong. If you censor something, the thing that was censored can be taken as what is correct, and the thing that is protected by censoring can be taken as automatically wrong.
I don't need to worry if this is the best way of finding truth. This exists only as a way to severely punish people who censor. The things they fear most, to such a point that they actually censor you, should be the very thing that they help unleash.
All you need to do is simply assume that all things that are censored are good and true, and all things that are kept protected are wrong and false.
The raw fundamental aspect of this mindset is important. The harshness and speed of judgement is important.
It is important to immediately, without any question, look right at a person who censors you, and immediately say to their face, "You just tried to censor me, and only liars do that. You are wrong because you censored me. You are a wrong person for trying to censor me. I will make sure we all know that YOU in particular are a person who censors, and only people who are WRONG need to censor."
Eliminating censorship is possible. We just need to make people who censor feel as if their attempts to control us automatically backfire. Absolute demoralization. This is the dystopia we all feared, and it will only get worse in the coming years unless we do something.
And if left/right is only a pendulum, then this technique will still work even if mass-politics change. It is a technique that will drive out censorship itself, rather than any particular belief, and most certainly, it is the sort of technique that will hit with a lot of very destructive power, if used by enough people on all topics that are currently considered censored or unspeakable.
I don't mind the mess.
Thanks for your insights, I always look forward to them. This: "All you need to do is simply assume that all things that are censored are good and true, and all things that are kept protected are wrong and false." ...does not seem like a reliable heuristic however. Do you mean just as a way to apply pressure to change policy?
Yes, it's purely to apply pressure. It's meant to play a rough and tough game of assuming the worst, and demanding that they play fair with words and ideas, and aren't allowed to try to force their opinion on everyone. It's a harsh stance where the opposition to censorship becomes more important than "philosophical debate about the nature of truth", and the stakes become increasingly high, as well as how brutally the game must be played.
Once this sort of thing calms down, I'm sure rational science and technological progress will continue in the normal logical and evidence based fashion.
If people want a "community hub" someplace on the internet, then it ought to play by the idea that true and good ideas can be proven with time and cannot be permanently tarnished or defeated, while bad ideas and wrong information will always begin to falter and decay, never being able to prove its point or purpose in the long-term.
I have absolutely no fear of any words a person might say, nor do I fear any creation of AI, be it words, images, or motion picture/Full VR. I will just use it as I do any machine, and that is according to my will.
I am pathologically honest by nature and it does not come easily, to be such a devious subversive. But then, that is one of your best attributes. We make a good team I think