Homeland Security's Plan to Police Misinformation on Twitter

I don't think this is gonna work. Oh my god I can't see. Ugh. Oh fuck. I can't like. I can't see at all. I don't know how you're supposed to see out of that. It's a deadly outfit. I guess I'll just put that on when I want to say something incriminating. Yeah. What do you mean? Well the thought police. So pull up that article Jamie at the beginning of this podcast. We should probably go right into this. Cause apparently the Department of Homeland Security and Twitter. Yeah. Were working together. Are we on? Yeah. I don't hear. There we go. The Department of Homeland Security was they had a plan to police information and they were working with Twitter in some fashion. Look at this. Quietly broadening its effort to curve speech it considers dangerous. Yeah. What does that mean? I don't know. An investigation by the Intercept has found years of internal DHS memos, emails and documents obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit as well as public documents illustrate the expansive effort by the agency to influence the tech platforms. Shit. The work much of which remains unknown to the American public. Came into clear view earlier this year when DHS announced a new disinformation governance board. Good Lord. A panel designed to police misinformation false information spread unintentionally. Disinformation false information spread internally. Intentionally. Intentionally excuse me. And malinformation factual information shared typically out of context with harmful intent. Malinformation is a weird one. Malinformation? Yeah. Because it's factual but it's shared typically out of context. With harmful intent. That's where you're like, look, you don't understand why we mowed down those reporters with the chopper. It's out of context. You can't just show the video. While the board was widely ridiculed immediately scaled back and then shut down within a few months other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate, the war on terror, has been wound down. So that's been wound down. Apparently. Platforms have got to get comfortable with government. It's really interesting how hesitant they remain. Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly. Look at that. Platforms have got to get comfortable with government. What does that mean? I don't know. Tim Poole sent me this this morning. I didn't get a chance to re- I was in the gym. Look you got to get comfortable with government. Yeah that's what I've been saying. Just get comfortable. Yeah why aren't you comfortable with government? Cozy up. Why aren't you comfortable? Put on some sweatpants. Oh. Cozy up. Wow. That's what we do. That's creepy. I mean I guess we all kind of suspected it though right? It's not like anybody that's, is that a shocker? Well what Tim Poole said is that Twitter was working with them. That they, I guess they weren't being honest about it. They were working with them. Will we tell me that Jimmy Kimmel tweeted something and tried to delete it? Yeah it looks like I could be wrong about this but Kimmel was pissed at Musk. Why? For buying Twitter. But what does he care? What does he mad about? So basically like a lot of people seem to be really upset with Elon for buying Twitter because Elon is saying that he's not going to censor Twitter anymore. He's going to like let you know all the banned people are going to get back on apparently you know it's like they're trying to figure it out how to do it. And so this is upset a lot of people who were happy with the idea that it was being like hyper moderated in a way I think that fits in with their politics. That was the idea. So it's like their team was in control for a second and now somebody, you know what it reminds me of? It's like when a new Booker shows up in a comedy club and all the comics start talking shit. It's like scary. It has been interesting over the years to watch you blossom from the electric car guy into a fully formed piece of shit. Wow. And look see it says this tweet was deleted by the tweet author. Learn more. He was replying to a tweet that Elon tweeted. And what was the tweet? That was the tweet that Elon deleted. Oh that was a tweet where it's this it's like the Santa Monica observer or something like that was tweeting something about the Paul Pelosi attack and that Santa Monica observer has been known to tweet things that aren't that aren't correct or at least has or not tweet published things that aren't correct at least has in one instance that they were citing something about Hillary Clinton. I don't know but you know he I think what Elon tweeted was there's a tiny chance that we might not be getting the full story and then he tweeted that story. Yeah. I think that's the idea that maybe Paul Pelosi knew this guy because people have been trying to pin that guy and say that he was a right wing MAGA guy. But didn't he live in like some fucking hippie collective and he made like hemp jewelry. He did Wuda Q pipeline. He went Wuda Q. So like he apparently had some kind of blog or something. I think he started off WU super hippie ayahuasca mystical and then gradually kind of devolved into Q QAnon QAnon. Twitter's Twitter's fact checking the president United States is incorrect facts. Right. Which is crazy that that's happening. Well this is the emperor wears no clothes. That's the fable right. Like this naked dude's going around everybody's scared of him. They're like beautiful robes. And then some kid is like he's naked. Look he's obviously naked. And then another person like oh yeah you're right. He is. It's like that is the pot. That is the like I guess the hope of the Internet is that truth comes out and it destabilizes bad power struck bad structures. Exactly. You want to. You're going to have to be wrenching this shit that doesn't work so that it like stops working and you rebuild instead of patching up old wobbly things that are like smokes coming out gears are flying off and you're supposed to pretend like it's working. That's where it gets creepy. It's like you know if the if the machine that is failing starts telling tech companies or whoever like what is real and what isn't then a broken machine is then like articulating truth which then so if someone starts telling the truth then but where's no clothes and then like Twitter throws up underneath like this is potential misinformation or whatever. That's why this Department of Homeland Security thing is so creepy because that would be the same people the same people that are telling you things that are factually inaccurate or that are getting fact checked on Twitter would be the very people that would get to dictate what is mal information. Yeah like mal information was the craziest one. Like everybody thinks you shouldn't be able to say things that aren't true right or if you do you must correct them. Like are you are you telling the truth or you manipulating with lies. Right. He can't manipulate with lies. So if maybe you said something and you thought it was true let's correct that. But if you just keep doing that over and over and over again you never admit that and then you're the one who gets to dictate what's mal information. It's like the death throes of a dying system and it's reaching out in a time and it's acting and behaving the way it used to be able to behave when it had total access to what gets in what people get informed about or not. Right. It had complete control of that at one point in time. Well it's massive. I mean we're talking about how many offices are filled with people working for the government right now. Like how many if you put them in a building like would the building go all the way to the moon would be like a high rise that way. Probably the moon would be covered with government office buildings. But like it's massive and then it's so huge that you know just people get put into departments and some of the people that get put in the departments are good smart people and some of the people that get put in the departments they suck. Like everything in all walks of life. Yeah right. That's all it takes. So you get one like everybody's had a shitty manager. You get one shitty manager in some job where like he's got a little more power than he's supposed to have and then he's probably got people around him or like this is a bad idea and he's like well you're fired. And then people come in who are like this is a really good idea. He's like you're a genius if you think this is a good idea because it is. Then you have this like terrible geometry of like where the contagion happens where this one asshole like starts getting surrounded by concentric circles of assholes and then those people have so much power. And and that's I think what's going on with it is it's just like there's just too many people running things and of those people there's got to be some that are great. I know there is and there's some that are just abject monstrous power hungry coked up assholes. And I think that's when you start seeing shit like that is clearly a sign of I mean again maybe I'm being naive but I'd like to imagine that that's coming from like a few assholes. That's not coming from the totality of the U.S. government. All of it. It's just coming from like what a thousand assholes. But then there's also the real problem of actual misinformation that's being spread by bad parties. Like we know that. We know that there's misinformation that gets spread by bad governments. Like our enemies. We know that there's a whole industry. Like these Russian troll farms. Sure. I've talked about this before but on Facebook 19 of the top 20 Christian sites were being run by Russian troll farms. Oh yeah. I remember you saying that. That's fucked up. You know how nuts that is? That means they're like some conversations that are insane that don't make any sense. Like how is this a conversation? Well it might not be. It might be we're getting manipulated. It might be there's a bunch of and then the problem with people we were talking about before that we have this natural inclination to follow leaders. We do that online too man. Sure. And it's just like some really good tweets that point in a certain direction. People will start agreeing with it. People are easily, the idea that manipulation only applies to like verbal or written in a statement. No it fucking applies to tweets too. You can manipulate people with stuff. Dude I get manipulated all the fucking time. Are you kidding me? I'm like always getting caught up in bullshit online. I like go through like phases of like yeah oh my god. I pendulum between teams or I'll get caught up in some like deep crazy conspiracy. It's a very potent, by the way I'm not saying it's potent because I get manipulated easily but it's a potent drug. The internet's a potent drug. There's all kinds of operators. It's not just Russian troll forums. It's discordians. It's just basic like trolls who are bored. It's who knows what. Probably some cult we'll never know about. Just some weird cult on an island somewhere with some nefarious purpose that's like trying to put some certain information on the internet. It's an ocean of madness and maybe like the horrible idea is okay we can control the ocean of madness. What we're going to do because some of these people are other states trying to cause discord in our society that could lead to a civil war, the collapse of the United States. We've got to do something about this. Call up Twitter. Listen, it's a problem. You got to let us tell you what's real and what's not real. At first maybe that's great. It's like look this is 100% coming from Russian trolls. This whatever this is. This is Russian AI trolls. But then all of a sudden the president calls that department. He's like hey is there any way that you could also start applying that to people who say that I seem like I'm kind of out of it? You know what I mean?