Social Media Is an Attack Surface

The pseudonymous writer WBF posted a piece called Social Media Has Not Brought Liberation on Liberal Currents today. 

The premise is that social media has "been a boon to autocratic regimes and their allied movements in democracies."

A few quotes from the piece, all of which is worth reading:

It’s fair to ask what makes social media such a uniquely vulnerable attack surface* for authoritarians. After all, foreign countries have always been able to print newspapers or operate radio stations in other nations, and frequently have. But the difference in the ease of social media as an attack vector means that a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

The example given is that the Soviets spent $3 billion per year on propaganda in the 1980s to little effect, vs. just $1.25 million per month for the Internet Research Agency in more recent years, where they reached over a hundred million Americans on Facebook alone. That's bang for your rubles. 

The Soviets weren't short on resources or ambition. They were short for not yet having an information environment where placement is free, laundering is instant, and distribution is handled, at scale and for pennies, by the target country's own most widely used consumer products....

Cold War information control was control over discrete activities: the paper you read in the morning, the broadcast you watched at night, the pamphlet someone pressed into your hand. You consumed media, and then you stopped consuming it and went about your day. But social media is not an activity—it is the substrate of daily life. It is where people find jobs, sell furniture, meet spouses, argue with their uncles, and store their baby photos....

The reason that none of the promised liberatory effects of social media have materialized is simple: it actually is not that difficult for competent authoritarian states, unbound by any kind of commitment to rule of law or free expression, to control the medium....

It may be difficult to track down a single dissenting voice if it belongs to someone with the determination and technical competency to post anonymously. But it’s trivially easy to drown them out.

I first saw reference to the article this morning from Will Stancil on BlueSky. He gave the example of the Soviets' spending reduction, and then said:

I’ve been convinced for some time that that social media is the taproot of the madness that has slowly consumed our politics. Traditional media was full of gates – some editorial, some practical, some economic – that prevented ideas from spreading freely. Social media has few, close to none. 

Traditional media’s gates reinforced each other. It was expensive to produce a newspaper so lots of effort went into planning the content; it was the product of great intentionality. There was limited broadcast spectrum available so access was regulated and placed under competent institutions. 

By reducing the cost and technical difficulty of worldwide publishing to almost nothing, the internet has also destroyed any pressure to maintain standards governing which information circulates. Instead of institutions structuring the public’s collective mind, you get this roiling ocean of ideas. 

There are two problems here, one eternal and one novel.

The eternal problem is humanity’s preference for self-validation. Left to our own devices we seek out ideas that flatter our biases and resentments, reinforce our own notions of how the world works. Crowds develop manias, they hallucinate. 

The novel problem is the falling cost of publishing - first through the internet, and then again through social media. That means publishers have endless competition. Vast institutions like the New York Times are jostling with random teenagers for audience eyeballs. 

With so much competition, publishers - the institutions and the randos alike - are dragged back towards audience validation as a strategy for keeping eyeballs on them. If anyone demurs they’re simply outcompeted by a publisher who did not. 

So the long-observed tendency of groups of people to collapse into hysterias and manias, to swing wildly between feverish ideas, has reemerged — but at a massive scale, a scale previously almost impossible because the spread of ideas required structures that could filter out the madness.

One related comment in response to Stancil:

I get why gatekeeping in its negative sense is bad but also it feels an awful lot like gatekeeping in the positive sense was a load bearing pillar of society. 
The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social

As a person who spent almost 10 years within a journalism school before these changes happened, working with people who studied the history, political economy, and sociology of news-making, and before that worked with organizations in Washington as the Reagan administration was deregulating broadcasting, I know that 20th century U.S. media were not perfect. 

We had many ideas about how to make things better, how to create "a more perfect union" in news. More voices, different voices was part of that and in some ways was finally starting to happen just as the bottom began to drop out of the economic model of "traditional" media. 

Mediation by humans with values based at least partly in ethics is what has been lost in media. Is that irony? That there's no mediation in media? It's all direct transmission through an algorithm, programmed from economic interest. 

But even if the algorithms are done away with or made financially liable for their promotions, as the Liberal Currents article calls for at the end, is that enough? It may be better, but I wonder.

A few more comments:

it's not that social media produces fascists, but that it produces antisocial behaviour broadly, where even good acts of protest can quickly devolve online into just another method for expressing antisocial impulses in a way that feels "safe" to do
Corey Atad

yeah, I think that's right. and relatedly I think it cannibalizes in-person social institutions by substituting a worse but omnipresent version of human interactions
ryan cooper

Enough writing online for today. Time to go do something in the real world.

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* I learned this term from reading Cory Doctorow. Social media is an attack surface.

Yay for Rain!

Did I mention it finally rained here? (Yes, I think I did.)

Over the past five days or so, we've gotten about 2.5" and there's a good chance it will rain on a few more days in the coming week. 

Crossing my fingers that the drought of 2026 is broken, and our trees will be saved. 
 

Anniversaries

Today, on the 25th anniversary of September 11, I just realized that I've missed noting two significant anniversaries in my own life.

I moved to Minnesota 40 years ago at the beginning of September (I don't remember the exact date I arrived). 

I moved into the house I live in 30 years ago, just before the beginning of September.

That means September 11 was only five years after we moved into this house. It seems like more than five years had elapsed between the two, and not nearly as many years since.

This is not an original thought, but the collapsing of time as I get older is something I will never get used to.

One World, One Ocean

Today I am avoiding the news by looking at this projection of the Earth that unifies the oceans instead of focusing on the land masses:

The BlueSky post where I saw it said:

Every map slices the ocean apart to keep the land whole. This one does the opposite: on the Spilhaus projection, every ocean on Earth is one connected body of water, with a year of real satellite-tracked currents flowing across it. Data: NASA OSCAR + NOAA OISST 

The original post, linked above, is a short GIF showing the color-correlated currents shifting over time.
 

Some Books

I'm declaring a reading vacation. Which makes things lean in the blog department on some days, but that's the way it is.

Escapism from all this may continue until morale improves. 

We Interrupt the Road Trip Posts...

Too much escapism here at Daughter Number Three in the last couple of days, so it's time for some more worry! (Sorry about that.)

Yesterday, after seeing an Australian poll showing a surge toward the Right, a person on BlueSky asked

what’s going on with the world man. why is the far right resurgent everywhere? it’s easy to blame whatever policy boogeyman (neoliberalism, housing shortage, immigration, etc etc) but I think it has to be something deeper. 

maybe lived memory is dying out of how evil fascism is

Another person, whose bio says they study the Third Reich, reposted that with this comment:

More to the point, this is happening in *non-white* countries as well: Japan, Turkey, and India have huge far-right nativist blocs. So it's not merely white supremacy or nostalgia for the days when the West ruled.

Nor is it happening purely in developed post-material countries.

In turn, a sociologist named Katherine Alejandra Cross posted the previous two, along with this:

It's impossible to exonerate the internet, and social media in particular here. It allowed for the efficient networking and ratcheting-up of our worst impulses at unbelievable speed and scale. In-group/out-group dynamics are as old as the hills, but social media is a particle accelerator for them.

One response to Cross's thought, from a person named Mecha-Herz, may be correct, I'm afraid:

And counter to some of the arguments about eventual equilibrium after the introduction of the printing press, radio etc., I'm not convinced we can meaningfully adapt to these new technologies. Our brains are not evolved to deal with this shit.

 

Ten Years Ago

Philando Castile was killed by a cop named Jeronimo Yanez 10 years ago today. Yanez was charged with manslaughter, but found not guilty just a bit less than a year later.

Since then, Philando's mother, Valerie Castile, became an activist. Much of the coverage of this 10-year anniversary has focused on her work. Ramsey County prosecutor John Choi, who brought the charges against Yanez, continues to speak at the same conferences as Castile, both of them talking about how to handle police shootings.

According to Minnesota Public Radio,

“I'm a different prosecutor today compared to what I was back then,” Choi said. “It changed me as a human being, as a prosecutor, looking at a lot of things and getting to this place where I recognized that it's not right to have the type of policing that resulted in Philando's death.”

In the ensuing years, Choi and local law enforcement departments in Ramsey County have largely moved away from the sort of pretextual stops that led to Philando being pulled over, he said. Preliminary data from a new study shows cities like St. Paul have kept those numbers low.

 It has been a long 10 years since then. 

• My first post on the killing, from the day after.
• My post on the not-guilty verdict.
• There was an effort to name a new training fund for cops after Philando, but that idea was voted down by ... cops.
• A peace garden has been created next to the place where he was killed. 
• His family and friends created the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which gives small personal grants to families affected by gun violence. 
  
  

Rain

Yay, it's finally really raining!

I didn't think it would, even when we had a minor bit in early afternoon. I didn't check the weather after that, I admit, so I was taken by surprise at about 7:00 p.m. when there was actual rain, and it's still coming down now, steadily. 

This is the kind of rain that soaks in. So hurray for that. It has been several weeks since we had rain, and before that bit of rain (which was a good amount), there was another multi-week gap.

It has been a dryish spring. 

The plants are finally happy.
 

Stuff

For those of us who have had the responsibility of clearing out our parents' homes, whether before or after their deaths — and for anyone who hasn't begun to think about it yet, for themselves or for a parent — this essay by David Weiss is worth your time.

It's called Trashing My Dad (or What's Left of Him). 

The Broadview Six

I'm far from the first person to note the MO of Trump and his regime when it comes to violating laws and the constitutional order, but after the many court cases they have lost, including multiple judges decrying their actions, it was the one yesterday against the Broadview Six that has finally put some words in my mouth.

Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and First Amendment litigator who was Twitter-famous as Pope Hat and is now on BlueSky, had a great thread explaining what happened in the Broadview grand jury case. To summarize, the Trump prosecutor improperly vouched for aspects of the case to the grand jury, communicated with grand jury members off the record, redacted parts of transcripts and lied about it, and finally "when grand jurors voted no bill the first time, [prosecutors] asked grand jurors who had 'made up their mind' not to participate in the next ones." Essentially, they shopped for jurors who were most likely to agree to indict.

Given all of that, the judge released the six defendants from all charges, such that they cannot be charged again. The judge will be looking into prosecutorial misconduct.

The thing I want to say about this regime's way of conducting itself is this: They act like a badly brought-up first grader on a playground, one who does what he wants to other kids until he gets called on it and told to stop. And then his only words are "Who says?" and "Make me." 

Like I said, I know I'm not the first one to point out that the regime functions at a low level (or no level) of morality. But it's good to allow yourself to feel the shock of it again once in a while.

It's Saturday

I had a pretty nice day today and I will not ruin it by looking at social media.

I had a meeting with a neighbor about trying go do something to make a local intersection safer.

I looked at plants in my yard and took some pictures.

I cut down some of last year's plants in a local public garden. 

I took a tiny nap.

I had some ice cream at the neighborhood ice cream shop, which opened for the season last weekend. 

I did some tasks for an upcoming major event. 

Now I am going to read a book, or maybe see if there is anything worth watching on television.

I will not ruin it by looking at social media. 

Don't Spy on Me

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, has been working to protect privacy for a long time. 

Today he posted this thread to BlueSky (all quoted between the lines).

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The NSA and FBI have been spying on you without a warrant using section 702 of FISA for decades. Trump wants Congress to renew the law. Here are concrete examples of how this law has been abused – across administrations – and why Congress shouldn't rubber-stamp it.

• In 2020 Trump used 702 to spy on Black Lives Matter protestors.
• In 2021, the Biden administration used 702 to search the communications of multiple government officials, journalists and political commentators.
• Also in 2021, the Biden administration used it to spy on 19,000 donors to a political campaign.
• In 2022, an NSA employee used the 702 database to stalk women he met on dating apps.
• In 2019, Trump used this law to spy on members of Congress.
• In 2022, the Biden administration used it to spy on a state court judge who reported police abuses to the FBI.

Those are the ways in which we KNOW this law has been abused. The takeaway here is that NO ONE’S personal information or communications are safe.

Here’s how I’m concerned the Trump administration could use it in the future if Congress reauthorizes it:

• In 2024, Congress expanded Section 702 to cover “illicit synthetic drugs.” I fear the Trump administration could target women living in states with abortion restrictions that get abortion medications from overseas providers.
• Stephen Miller is behind the Trump administration’s push to reauthorize 702. They have already designated “Antifa” organizations as foreign terrorist groups. It’s likely Miller will use 702 to surveil, target, and suppress activists on the left.
• Also in 2024, Congress expanded the range of who can be forced to comply with Section 702 surveillance orders. Your cable guy could be forced to install spyware on behalf of the government and help them surveil you.
• 702 abuses span across administrations and political spectrums. I’ve fought for reforms to Section 702 of FISA during every administration. This isn’t a red issue or a blue issue – it’s a civil liberties issue. Security and liberty aren’t mutually exclusive.

But rubber-stamping these powers for Donald Trump poses a unique and chilling threat to Americans’ most basic constitutional rights.

The deadline to renew the law is coming up next week. Trump needs both Republicans AND Democrats to vote to reauthorize this law. Anyone with a pulse ought to see that in no world should Trump and Kash Patel have these powers.

I’ll continue fighting like hell to sound the alarm and throw up roadblocks. But if the thought of the Trump administration having these powers scares you, now’s the time to make your voice heard.

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This is the spot where I say, Contact your U.S. senators to express your opinion on renewing Section 702 of FISA. It sounds like an obscure bunch of numbers and letters, but it's not.
 

Earth Day Data Visualization

The warming of the Earth can be seen in the global average temperature year by year. Usually that data is shown within a relatively short time span, like this graph that starts in 1850:

That increase in the past few decades looks pretty extreme. 

But check out how much more extreme it looks when it's shown on a scale of 2,000 years: 

As always, this is where you can show the annual stripes (since 1895) globally, nationally, regionally, or locally.

Something's Afoot

No real post from me tonight. 

I did a dumb thing and stumbled off a curb, which has resulted in what may be a broken foot. So I'm currently sitting here with my leg elevated and an ice pack on the foot. 

Shivering and in a bit of pain. Drat. (I said worse words at the time.)

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Saturday update: the foot is relatively fine: not broken. I guess it's a strained or sprained tendon, so RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) for a few days. I can walk on it with a limp, and walking on it is good, they say — which was my biggest worry last night, aside from the pain as an indicator of worse things.

Pain is much improved and not much swelling, so I think all will be well.

Hermetically Sealed

It's too soon to breathe easy, but it looks like the voter-suppressing SAVE Act will not pass the U.S. Senate. 

I wrote about it a few days ago, and Jamelle Bouie gave it a trouncing a few days later (gift link), including something I had omitted: that it also would kill voting by mail. In addition, he made it even clearer that it allows specifically for the return of Jim Crow voter suppression.

Meanwhile, my MAGA relative continues to insist that it's no big deal since it only affects people have to register or re-register. 

I couldn't resist taking a screen shot of a recent post, with the responses from their like-minded friends:

(Click to better see the post and comments in all their SAVE-supporting glory.)

The fact that no one replies who disagrees reinforces the relative's perspective, of course, but there's a reason no one posts who disagrees. If you do, you get swarmed with illogical and sometimes hateful responses, and they never stop responding. They have to have the last word, and their answers devolve further and further. 

I checked out the profiles of the people who had commented. One woman had a picture of Jesus Christ walking on a beach as her cover photo, while one guy had this:

So that was a bit of divergence. At least he didn't add Jesus to his flag list. 

Locally, we had some good news recently: long-time political cartoonist Steve Sack has returned to the drawing board recently. Find out the whole story here. One of his recent cartoons is about the SAVE Act:

That's the truth of it, as Trump himself has said. I'm glad to have Sack back in the action.

What About Those Car Carriers?

As we live through the current "drawdown" of DHS paramilitaries here in Minnesota, no one quite knows what's going on. There do appear to be significantly fewer overt grabs happening in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, but reports are that they continue in greater Minnesota and farther suburban areas. The feds keep lying about how many personnel they have here currently, and how many they intend to keep here, including telling bald-faced lies to members of Congress. 

So no one is resting easy and people have not returned to "normal," whatever that is these days.

And then there are the multiple car-carriers full of brand-new black Suburbans and Chevy Tahoes that have been seen driving into the Whipple Building in the past week or so. Why would DHS need dozens and dozens of new urban assault vehicles if they're withdrawing from the area?

Today there was a short conversation on BlueSky with a hypothesis:  

My husband’s theory about all the truckloads of fleet vehicles going INTO Whipple when there’s allegedly a drawdown is government inefficiency.  They ordered tons in December and just now getting delivered. Thoughts?   Would be cool if four federal electeds could get information on this!
@mauratwit.bsky.social

I was thinking this awhile ago. I think it’s also possible that the equipment procurement people don’t talk to the personnel people.
Norm Charlatan

Seems about right for this administration.
Bart @mud2minnehaha.bsky.social

I've suspected/hoped it was a logistical problem, but then again we don't ever hear "flatbeds of vehicles LEAVING," which would help confirm that. 
Professionally Certified Woolgatherer @earational.bsky.social

It does seem that the same vehicles would be seen leaving at some point soon if the deliveries were a mistimed mistake, right? And the Whipple Building in general would be returned to its previous federal uses, none of which were as an illegal detention center or base for DHS goons.  

5th Tahoe shipment of the day at the Whipple Building (today, March 9). More last week as well. Source.

Video from a car carrier driving in six days ago.  

Rating Morality

I have a couple of thoughts on this chart from Pew Research:

(Click to enlarge.)

As it shows, the U.S. is the only country among the 25 they surveyed where the majority rated their fellow citizens as not having good morals and ethics.

First, it's too bad Pew has never asked this question in its surveys before, because I really want to know how the answer for the U.S. has changed over time. As they noted in the write-up, 

Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate fellow Americans as morally and ethically bad (60% vs. 46%).

I wonder if that would have been true in 2015 or earlier. I would be willing to bet money it was not. (It seems fair to think that if 30–40% of your fellow citizens are willing to vote for Donald Trump once or twice, despite everything he's done, you might feel as though there's a problem with their morals and ethics.)

Second, I wish the survey had included Russia, because I really want to see how Russians would score their fellow country members. My thought is their ratings would be even lower than the American percentages.   

Third, what is it like to live in a country where 80% or more of people think their fellow citizens are morally and ethically good? Wow. Envious.

How would you answer Pew's question, if you were surveyed? Despite all that has happened in the last 10 years, I think I would have said "somewhat good."
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I note that Turkey and South Africa appear to be about tied for the highest percentage of people who replied "Very bad," while India has the highest percentage who replied "Very good."

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I've been brushing up on my NATO Phonetic Alphabet, the better to be able to call out license plate numbers. I was rusty, despite being raised in a radio ham household. 

There were a good dozen letters I could never seem to bring out of my memory.

So this card, which I saw on BlueSky a few days ago, has been handy to bring it all back into short-term recall:

Oscar is the only one I haven't had much use for. I guess states don't use O very much on license plates because it would be too easy to confuse with 0. 
  

Facebook Experience During the ICE Occupation

I know social media is not everything, but I can't count how many Twin Cities people I know who have not posted to Facebook in years, who have broken silence there to post about the federal invasion that is happening here.

Personally, I almost never post there, though I have to stay there to help run accounts for some organizations I'm involved with. But I have also posted to my own account a number of times.

I wasn't planning to get into all this because I know I have several "friends" who are Trump supporters and I try not to do the equivalent of shouting in people's faces about things we disagree on within a forum where they can't choose what they see (unlike this blog: if they come here, they decided to do that).

But after one relative kept posting blatantly false material about what happened to Renee Good and then (!) posted a video of an ICE agent pushing a Minneapolis person into the street — in front of a bus* — with positive comments, I decided that person's tender feelings could take seeing a few things from me.

Yes, she thought it was good that a person might have been run over by a bus because they were standing in front of an ICE agent's vehicle, recording. And yes, as with all of the MAGA stuff she posts, every other single comment in response echoes her point of view. Except mine, in this case. 

Several of her friends responded to my measured comment, which talked about proportionality of response. I pointed out that the driver of the ICE vehicle could have backed up, since there was space behind the ICE SUV. That standing on a city street for a few seconds is mildly illegal, if anything — a citation. Recording in a public place is not illegal. While on the other hand, pushing a person is assault. Pushing them in front of a bus is attempted homicide.

But the friends (and my relative) just keep responding about how the man was obstructing, that what he was doing was illegal. Which is what always happens when anyone tries to reply to MAGA people in a reasonable way. They can never admit they are wrong. 

This was clearly assault, and attempted homicide of some kind. Whatever level of illegality, if any, the man standing in the street was committing, pushing him in front of a bus would not be seen as reasonable by a jury.  

Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne was also shoved into the street by an ICE agent a few days ago, while he was doing nothing but standing on a public sidewalk, speaking calmly to members of IC. It was captured on video. No bus was involved, though. 

When my relative first posted the bus video, no one else had commented yet. If there had been a bunch of "hell yeah" comments, I probably wouldn't have replied. But I thought it was a chance to reframe it.

Maybe some people who saw what I wrote did have that experience. I will never know. The ones who commented are lost souls, at least for now.

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* I had previously seen this video shared through local social media as an outrageous example of ICE behavior. In the video, the person recording or someone near them can be heard screaming "What the FUCK?!" after the man is pushed in front of the bus. Which is the appropriate response.

Daughter Number Three, 18 Years

I started this blog 18 years ago today, so it's now old enough to vote. That's 6,732 posts, if the stats are to be believed.

When DN3 the person turned 18, she had just started her freshman year of college, a small-town girl leaving home for the first time. There was no one significant to vote for that year, and there really wasn't until I had turned 21.

I spent that first year at a small liberal arts college a few hours away, but it felt pretty distant in those days, with a pay phone at the end of the hall and only letters for communication. I was my usual misfit self and was pretty unhappy in fall term. Even though I had chosen to live on the "quiet floor," I managed to draw the rowdiest roommate, the one whose parents made her choose that floor. So I got my share of exposure to drugs, drinking, and the occasional guy staying over unexpectedly. But I also had my taste in music expanded greatly, and learned a lot about upper class East Coast people. 

The bigger problem was that I thought the college was too small a place, academically — meaning I would run out of classes to take. And I had no friends, too. So I decided to transfer to a larger public university for my sophomore year. 

Just around the time I knew I would be leaving, of course, I started to find "my people." Which made it harder to leave than I would have thought. And a few of the classes I had there continue to be extremely influential in my life to this day.

I don't know how my life would have been different if I had stayed. 

It's hard to believe I've been doing this blog as long as my entire life through that first year of college. But that's the nature of sliding-scale time as we get old. 

Oddly, I don't have a single photo of myself from that year of college. The photo on this post is from my summer job not long before I left home, so it's as close as I can get. (I'm still not big on taking pictures of myself, compared to a lot of people, despite having a camera on me at all times.) 

Thanks for being here!

Here's what was in the news during the 1977–78 academic year (September–August):

The U.S. agreed to turn over control of the Panama Canal to Panama by the end of the century, there was lots of German terrorist activity (hijackings and kidnappings), three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were killed in a plane crash, smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization, Harvey Milk was elected to the board of supervisors in San Francisco (the first openly gay official in any large U.S. city), Anwar Sadat went to Israel to meet with Menachim Begin, Rhodesia announced it would accept multiracial democracy within two years, the show Dallas started the prime-time soap opera trend, Somalia began to fall into civil war, the Unabomber began bombing, the rainbow flag was used for the first time, Louise Brown — the first "test-tube" baby — was born near Manchester, Pope Paul VI died and John Paul I was elected, and the Sandinistas got control of Nicaragua's National Palace.

In technology news, though perhaps not in mainstream news at the time: optical fiber got its first use; TCP/IP was tested successfully, connecting the first three ARPANET nodes, in what eventually became the Internet protocol; and the first global positioning satellite was launched in February 1978.

People who died that year who seem particularly significant to me: Steven Biko, Charlie Chaplin, and Hubert Humphrey.

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My past anniversary posts, each with an age-appropriate photograph:

• First
• Second
• Third
• Fourth 
• Fifth 
• Sixth 
• Seventh
• Eighth 
• Ninth
• Tenth
• Eleventh
• Twelfth
• Thirteenth
  
• Fourteenth
• Fifteenth
• Sixteenth 
• Seventeenth