Social Control Media as a Rapid Race to the Bottom - Part III - Foreign Interference and Chaff/Flare
Why would you trust alleged 'communication' (platforms) controlled by the same people who cut your undersea cables?
In prior parts (see Part I and Part II) we spoke about social aspects of participation in increasingly toxic if not actively hostile Social Control Media. Maybe once upon a time it could be almost relied upon for communication, but that was a long time ago. The business model or the aim of today's Social Control Media is to interfere with or manipulate communications.
People communicate with other people, but politicians and states typically communicate with quite a lot of people, whom they're supposed to represent and sometimes actually want to represent. It's all about communication. It's the connection.
"The radio yammers about 'information' being spread by politicians via Bytedance's TikTok," one person recently told us. "Thus they encourage engagement with that disinformation vehicle by lending it their credibility. This cannot end well."
TikTok is particularly bad. It's widely known or should be known that TikTok prevents communication about "sensitive" subjects that the Chinese government feels might 'discredit' its authority.
"The politicians and the media are only handing control of society over to the Kremlin through social control media that way," said the above person. "It seems that the last few days have seen a vast increase in news articles pretending that Xitter and Bytedance's TikTok [as] news sources. The underlying problem might be an increase in support by politicians in many countries for those two hostile platforms."
For communication people can use E-mail (nope, not GMail) or various tools meant to serve the users, not some companies. Hosting one's own Mumble server does not require a datacentre. It can be installed locally on some laptop or SBC, then used for communication within the family. Our whole family (on both sides) uses Mumble. It's hosted on my laptop, so the only "third parties" are ISPs and they cannot figure out what's said because transmissions are protected/shielded by strong encryption.
Do not assume that Social Control Media will facilitate unfettered communication between people and/or groups.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok are controlled by the US and China (both allies of Putin, who already sabotages assets near Baltic states, including Estonia and Finland*).
Any real communication platform should involve no third party. Definitely not a company like TikTok, whose goal is to increase "screen time" ("engagement" or "addiction"). In the next part we'll explain the impact of that. █
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* They call it "shadow fleet", which is a polite misnomer. Another one is "hybrid" war, or asserting that unwanted refugees cannot be weaponised.