TagMark Steyn
NYT on COVID: Not “Badly Misled.” One of the Worst Misleaders!
The Times writer smears legitimate doubt by associating it with unnamed questionable persons and causes — that works if people don’t know the story
New U.S. Disinformation Board on Hold Amid Flak From Both Sides
Most current controversies are not clear divisions between True and Untrue or Right and Wrong. Government would merely reinforce the EstablishmentIf you’d blinked, you’d have missed it: The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday paused a new and controversial board’s work on disinformation and accepted the resignation of its leader, capping weeks of concerns about impinging on free speech rights and at times frenzied conspiracy theories about the board itself… The Disinformation Governance Board’s director, Nina Jankowicz, wrote Wednesday that the board’s future was “uncertain,” according to a resignation letter obtained by The Associated Press. Nomaan Merchant and Amanda Seitz, “New ‘disinformation’ board paused amid free speech questions” at Associated Press (May 18, 2022) A recommendation as to whether the Board should continue will be offered, we are told, within 75 days. The Washington Post knows who to blame: “How Read More ›
Books: The First Step in Fighting Cancel Culture
Malicious envy was always out there but before social media it could rarely assemble so large a mob
What Your News Feed Will Look Like If Big Tech Runs It
Reading Elkus’s essay, one wants to ask, “Who is the collective ‘we’ who are supposed to be out of control?”In an essay at The New Atlantis, Adam Elkus, a graduate student in computational social science at George Mason University, reflects on a curious change in public panics in recent years: Pundits’ obsession with AI doom has given way to “primal fear of primates posting,” with demands that top government or Big Tech crack down on social media: Once upon a time — just a few years ago, actually — it was not uncommon to see headlines about prominent scientists, tech executives, and engineers warning portentously that the revolt of the robots was nigh. The mechanism varied, but the result was always the same: Uncontrollable machine self-improvement would one day overcome humanity. A dismal fate awaited us. We would be Read More ›
“Disinformation”: Do We Really Need a “Reality Czar”?
Canada dodged a bullet in 2014. The United States will not be so lucky if it adopts Big Tech's new proposals against “disinformation” onlineRecently, a New York Times technology columnist, back from a consult with Big Tech in Silicon Valley, urged U.S. President to appoint a “reality czar” to go after people who provide “disinformation” online. He concedes, “It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant.” Well yes, rather. And the czar would probably soon find himself in conflict with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But Kevin Roose (pictured), who says he has spent several years tackling “our national reality crisis”, begs us to hear the czar’s supporters out: This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems. (For example, it could formulate “safe Read More ›
“Brilliant Vision” from a Century Ago Foretells Today’s Internet
In E. M. Forster's dystopia, people interact only through the MachineIn a wholly materialist environment, science and other disciplines have, by preference, ceased to explore anything but their own ideas.
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Social Media Censorship? Governments Weigh the Options
The United States may be going in the opposite direction from other Western countries
How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Our Language
Culture critic Mark Steyn reflects on the Matrix and the red pill, which seems to be everywhere
Google branches out into politics
Unfortunately, the only political model it would likely know is: One-party stateThe unchallenged manipulation of search engine results during elections is a new phenomenon made possible by the domination of the internet by a few big players.
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