ah the hello, i'm manila chan you are tuned into modus operandi. billions of people around the world use social media daily. it's hard to remember what life looks like before the internet. smartphones automated this automated that the use of technology has certainly made life more convenient for most people around the world. but did you ever stop to think about how that technology is using you,

even worse how governments are using that technology on you? this week we'll look into the overlap of big tech and politics all around the world . all right, let's get into the m l. me . technology is all around you. you're watching this right now because a big tech, but the industry is not as fun and virtuous as it likes to present itself. the same people who make it so you can laugh at cat videos, share your baby's 1st steps, or your hottest dance moves. are also the same people who shape political narratives at the behest of governments, in effect big tech shapes how you see the world and helps the government see you. joining us to discuss all of this is chris and garage co host

of be covert action bulletin podcast and technology writer, chris, thank you for being with us. first, chris, let's look at the big picture here. what's your take on the role of big tech and politics both domestically and abroad? just like any big business, you know, big tech has a huge role in u. s. and global politics. and of course the u. s. as a giant role in global politics as well, i would say it's outside as i think we all know. but the role of big tech is very unique in a sense that many of these platforms actually play the role of information sharing . the tell us what information we're allowed to see, they share information with us. they collected the news like google news or so a stream like that, or they allow us to publish on them, but then they determine what's publishable and what's not. so of course we have seen platforms like youtube and facebook, twitter, soundcloud,

and so many others take down media that they don't care about. and of course, that influences the role of public discourse when it comes to national international politics on every level. there's also a significant amount of money that flows from the big tech companies, the communication companies. and i think there's a giant connection here between them as well when we look at it because they want to have that influence. and on the other side, they want to maintain and stay in the good graces of the us. and the western governments in particular, they really want to be able to do the bidding of those governments so that they are also able to get away with all of the interference in political discourse and discussion that they do as well as the surveillance. the non stop monitoring and constant, you know, working together with these surveillance states that they have. so there's the

money aspect certainly. but there's also the political aspect in terms of what they allow us to say. i mean, even now we are facing, you know, a bit of a crisis on a place like twitter. we're voices are, you know, being silenced, who are critical of the service. but that is nothing new. just been happening for many, many years since really ramped up of course, since 20152016. when in the u. s. the democratic party couldn't admit that they lost the election to donald trump. they had to blame, you know, so called russian interference. remember at 1st facebook actually said, you know, there was no such thing as russian interference, but they were quickly called to task by congress and fell in line. dr. burke is so still in line about a year later and said yes. in fact, there was this russian interference, so to say, and of course there is no, there was no proof of that and it's actually never been proven to this day. so as a result of that big check now, you know, says, you know, either they label you and say you are chinese state affiliated or russian state

affiliated or what have you, or they just straight off just block you. they don't allow you to be posted or the shadow band you, which in some ways is actually even the worst, because you believe you're posting to an audience. but in fact, you're not, you're posting into the ether and no one or very few people are actually seeing you . so the role that the big tech has played in the political discourse cannot be overstated because this is how we have discussion. this is how people across the world, billions of people across the world, actually learn about and talk about and have conversations and just engage with politics around the world, whether it's locally in their hometown or you know, some international issues. at the turn of the millennium, facebook was in its infancy, there was very little government oversight. it was almost shrugged off by politicians around the world is sort of a fad. today. it's believed facebook has shaped not only political outcomes,

but society writ large. what's your read on facebook? facebook, you know, remains the 11 of the largest social media platforms around the world and that is intentional for mark zuckerberg. they have continued to change the way facebook kind of works. it's the same basic idea. you connect with your friends, you like or follow pages that you want to engage with. whether it's a brand, a politician, a band you like, or just a funny page behind all of that. you know, facebook has really spent its time over the last, particularly last 10 years. and really the last $76.00 to $7.00, trying to reshape its own image because of the scrutiny that it's come under. there is the cambridge analytical scandal which we learned the facebook was just handing over data to a private company with no recourse really no little,

no recourse for facebook. there was, of course, the n s a, the prism revelations from edward snowden, where we learned that facebook among all of the other companies also were handing off to information to the n. s a. and just saying here, here's basically free reign to our entire database. and everything that everyone's posting. but there's also the, the, the role that facebook plays in terms of the day to day content moderation. and this isn't just the moderation of, you know, stuff that should be moderated, illegal, you know, content, things like that. but this is the moderation of political thought. that is the real issue. a number of years ago, facebook didn't experiment that they did. they didn't tell anyone about it. they showed an election day in the us, a banner at the top that said, you know, did you vote today? and for some people they just showed, you know, did you vote today? so many of your friends, they gave a number voted for some other people. they actually showed the names and images of

some of your friends who had said on facebook that they had gone to vote. and they used that as an experiment to see if people who saw the names and images of their friends were more likely to actually go vote. but they didn't explain this. they didn't tell anyone about this until much, much later. it was years later when we found out about this experiment. so that is a huge impact, potentially it, you know, on a national election in 2012 that facebook did not discuss and decided on its own unilateral to just go ahead and, and do who knows how many people, what is voted if they saw a reminder with their friends and the results were that more people did if they saw the pictures. there's also the question i think of whether or not, you know, facebook moderation itself is dangerous. with the recent announcement of, you know, trumps 2024 campaign. facebook actually had to put out an internal memo that was quickly leaks saying, you know, we cannot fact check. donald trump,

like we have not fact checked other politicians, but i think that's really hiding. the actual issue is that it's not just what the politicians that get fact check. it's about be alternative news media that also gets so called fact check. i've posted things myself either that i have written or that i have verified or trusted, or come from trusted sources that are real. and facebook just put a label on them. so this has been, you know, proven false when the so called correction article is actually a piece of you know, in some instances natal propaganda. so we also need to look at where facebook is going with the metaphors. zuckerberg has gone all in on this concept of the members, and so far it's not doing that well, even internally at facebook, the development of this, this platform, this, this experience, i guess they want to call it is not looking that good from a technical standpoint. but also from a standpoint of how do we,

the people who make these services and we make them by engaging in them by giving them content and by using them, how do we benefit from the members and that has yet to be seen. but what we do know is that they will be monetizing and they will also be tracking. they're going to be able to, with a headset on, do all sorts of tracking with your eyes and your brain scans all of those kinds of things that are going to be extremely invasive to the average person who is using that just to get some entertainment. so i think we need to, you know, keep an eye on facebook especially as we go into 2024. as the members becomes more and more of a reality. and it seems like sucker, burger's willing to just continue to spend billions and billions of dollars on it. so that's really where they're going there. my read ultimately on them is that they will do anything to make money and be play their role in controlling the global discourse around politics,

around health and around every other issue that impacts us 20 years or so. now, in to be social media revolution, there's finally some scrutiny into the role of big tack, whether it's the discussion of section 230 or bots, or governments using these platforms for sometimes nefarious purposes. what are the politicians missing in terms of regulation of these platforms, or should there be any regulation at all? well depends on his perspective you're looking at, i think for themselves, politicians aren't missing anything because it is in their interest to actually to have this kind of moderation to have this kind of incorrect oversight. i would say, don't both parties actually agree generally with repealing or significantly modifying section 230. and what's to 30 does is it simply says that a platform can not be held responsible for the content that it's users post on it.

as long as that platform takes steps to remove, you know, outwardly illegal material. and so that's actually a good thing. you don't want, whether it's facebook, twitter, or the blog that your neighbor runs about your city. you don't want that platform owner to have to be able to sit there and moderate each piece of content every single post. because while the larger platforms might be able to swing that kind of work, it's can actually drive out of business. the smaller forums, the smaller apps and websites, and also causes a major issue when you consider what that moderation is going to have to look like . can somebody, su facebook for example, if another user posts something about the 1st person that gets us into some very dangerous territory when we're thinking about that? so when we're looking, i think at the terms of regulation of these platforms, they're absolutely needs to be regulation of these platforms. but it's not the way

the politicians are looking at it. it needs to be in terms of who, again, who is using these platforms, right? if none of us were on facebook or on twitter or instagram, or read it any of these apps, then they couldn't exist, right? they rely on the fact that we are engaging with these platforms. as a means to discuss things with other people, to share pictures, to get news, to offer opinions and get advice to just really live socially, economically and politically. not so much, you know, people who do work on these platforms, the regulation needs to not be coming from the politicians as they exist today. but from careful consider discussion with the people who are the most affected by these, these platforms. it's not, you know, somebody sitting in, you know, facebook or at meta now and saying, here's the way that we're going to do things that should actually be a conversation globally ultimately, because this,

these are global networks with all of the people who use them saying, here's how we, the people who make these platform to make you with the money that you get off of these platforms. here's how these, these things should be running. all right, chris, go up and don't go anywhere. there's lots more to unpack. coming up next. well, talk to chris about how government use big tap against other hostile governments by manipulating its own civilians. we'll discuss it when we return. sit tight. the ammo will be right back. ah lou in east of canter. russian state. little never the tires on the northland scheme div. mm hm. and i'm not getting also something up with within the 55 with.

okay, so mine is 2000 speedy. one else with we will ban in the european union. the kremlin. yup. machine. the state on russia today and c, r t sputnik given our video agency, roughly all band to on youtube with, with through suffered because my business and you clean with not a shoes. i knew how many cups grey you, when you wrote it,

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. welcome back to the m. o krista ross. i was kind enough to shed some more light into this subject for us. so chris, recently the very sad story of the young woman in iran who died while in morality. police custody masa, meaning there are allegations of ca, trolls, or bots used to incite be iranian population for a mass uprising. maybe some would compare to the arab spring more than a decade ago. do tech and social media companies have an obligation to suss out government accounts? and is there even any way to do so? we'll start the 2nd question. is there a way to do it? there are ways to identify bought accounts. there are ways to identify accounts that are behaving strangely. did they just start posting and only post about one thing might be above. is it a bunch of accounts registered from the same location in the same few minutes?

might be a networking bots for sure. there's a lot of different ways and there has been a lot of really good research done into how do i find those, you know, i'm thinking about elan must right now and how we, since you took over twitter, he said, you know, we're going to make sure we get rid of the box, are going to do that partially through, you know, verification, enforce people to buy the blue check mark. and i think none of that is actually going to work. i think that's just all show you know, for 4 months. but the question of the box and also trolls is a very real one. we saw how quickly misinformation can spread. just recently there was a story that iran was going to execute 15000 people who were arrested as part of the protests. and it turns out that story was completely false and actually came from a cia funded organization. and so, you know, it was not real at all, but you know, peter frampton of all people, the musician picked it up and shared it, and it's spread like wildfire from bare. and some of the people spreading it were,

you know, certainly accounts that have been just posting anti iran propaganda. and some of the people who posted it and picked it up where people who mean, well, who actually, you know, care about women in iran. but saw this story, did not fax check. it did not look at where the source was and just ran with it because it was so scandalous. and i think that's part of the problem when it comes to social, is that we have to look at, you know, where are these things coming from? it doesn't take much for a small network and bots or trolls to plant a story, to catch the attention of the right person. somebody with a large trusted following. who will then you know, spread it. they don't have to be the sources themselves. just like, you know, in the past the cia, if we go back, you know, 5060 years, the ca, openly agents now will say openly that they were feeding information to journalists

. it's very similar, except now you don't have to have a face to do it. you can just use a big picture on a fake account you just signed up for and just continue pushing your hash tag or your image or whatever it is you have until somebody fixable. over in ukraine. many months back you on mosque gave the key of leadership star link, satellite internet service free of charge. now this was used not only by civilians for normal, everyday purposes. but mostly this gift was used by military forces for their saddle, imagery, and so forth to continue that war. but after a few months of this, you on mosque went to the binding administration and said, hey, this free trial period is over. i need to get paid for these services. i'm running a business here. u. s. government pay me. now, he got a lot of flack over that. but he said he effectively gave away more than $100000000.00 worth of equipment. is this a prime example of private business and in this case,

big tech interfering in global affairs or political wars? i mean, how do you view it? well, we start with just how to view the specific eli mosque incident. we can't take the man, i guess out of the context of that, you know, he wants the attention. he wants to say that he's done something good. this is the 1st time, and i'm sure it won't be the last that he has sought. that kind of attention for himself. i mean, the $44000000000.00 purchase of twitter is certainly another example of that. but when we're looking at what he did, you know, basically providing this equipment. i mean, you can't just say we're going to give this equipment and hand it over and here's a $100000000.00 worth of stuff. go figure out how to use it. there's also gotta be training. there's gotta be integration. so i would actually estimate that the value of the equipment and training was significantly higher because again, you can't just say, here's what you, you know, satellites go, go, use them ukrainian military,

that's technically not really feasible and also security risk unless you have a really good understanding of what you're actually doing with that technology. and yes, they were using it for civilians, right? they were letting civilians access the internet and share things through the starling satellites. but must hold one of his, you know, grand, you know, okay, times up. i'm losing money on this now. give me more attention and also money role moves on on back to the us government and he did get paid for that. but he also got a lot of attention which for him is something that he does want. but i think we need to look at where the, you know, how else big tech interferes in and engages in global affairs. you know, microsoft, amazon, google, oracle, many other companies offer cloud services to the department of defense to the pentagon, to customs and border protection to homeland security and others. and just for the nature of building these services and offering them,

they are actually intervening in affairs by saying to the government, we can help you, for example, track undocumented people more quickly in the us. and that is one of the things that talent here, a very large tech company does. they provide that service to homeland security. and in fact, they use amazon's a w s platform as part of that process. there's, you know, google cloud has, you know, similar offerings and there's, you know, many large companies who offer that, but also a lot of the smaller companies ultimately use the services of the big tech companies. right. so a, an analytic software might use amazon or google cloud offerings as part of their own services. and so we will amazon, microsoft or a goal, you know, the big platform, john, it's right. they end up making a ton of money either directly or indirectly from so it's actually within their interest to encourage or to incite global conflict up to and

including war. and that's no different than big business has ever been. and, you know, throughout history, you know, wars are for territory wars are for control, wars are for resources and political conquest and big tech is absolutely no different. with that. the recent us, mid term elections broke records in the way of spending $16700000000.00. a lot of that just an ad spend. now just to highlight a few of these hotly contested races, the one in georgia between rafael warnock and herschel walker. that's all the incumbent, democrat, warnock, with whopping, $40000.00 a month on average, on just social media spend. there were times his campaign hit well over a $100000.00 a month on social media. these numbers were actually fairly common across federal and local elections. is this kind of spending worth that i mean, isn't justified?

well, i think there's 2 very, very different questions i think, you know, is it worth it? well, if they, when it's worth it for them, if they get their message out, it's worth it for them. you know, obama was really one of the 1st national candidates to really use the influence of the internet to use advertising, to use social media as part of his campaign. and you know, he did a really good job of it. frankly, he learned he had a good young team who was able to take advantage of social media and also yes, spend a lot of money on facebook ad buys. we also, we see this now in really every election, local and state and national in the us. and i don't think it's going to go away anytime soon. unless there's a drastic change in terms of how the platforms are operating and how the platforms are actually, you know, engaging in shaping the debate. right. just like there people are spending on tv,

candidates spend on tv, radio billboards. now, you know robo calls and text messages. they're looking for any outlet, and people's attention is primarily on social media if their attention is on their feed rather than on the evening news on their tv, the more money is going to be spent there. but again, it gets into the question of what other content is then going to show up next to that candidates ad. and this is where a big issue always comes in. we saw, you know, a number of years ago when the social media social networking forum site read, it really became more corporate. they were purchased by candy nest. they started to ban a number of their forums called sub rhetoric. and some of them were extremely disgusting, awful. content, but their trust justification wasn't. this is awful content. their justification was our advertisers don't want to be associated with this. and so if somebody is buying political ads or just any kind of business ad and they're spending millions

of dollars over the course of an election or a year, and they say, i don't want to see ads for r t, for example. i don't want to see ads for cobra action magazine for whatever it is. then who's going, you know, who's gonna win out a smaller outlet with a smaller budgets to spend, or the candidate or politician who's actually going to end up being, you know, potentially in control of regulating that platform. i think the answer is very clear. it's going to end up being the candidate, the business, the politician. oh, all right, that's gonna do it for this weeks episode modus operandi, to show that, dig deep in the foreign affairs. i'm your host manila chan. thank you so much for tuning and we'll see you again next week to figure out the ammo. ah,

i'm willing to do it, you know, cranium to do it here. soon enough idea. she ship tucker, lean that ship with control. you put your boss so you should. she'll did etivia. i'm awarded aleki system. really premium. did not sing the anthem. missy. yeah, well, we can do 2 pocono channels. actually, jim's out arkell room dish with buffalo green's. he's not to larry's to modern day . my saw glam, but just dory. yes or no it's i live shibley's get us but we ship it with them. so to just stick with what i needed, if georgia tech you know what of them? i need a are you paying schools with a one they each or and you can actually reach according to

not to luggage group go to work. you don't feel good to break global foundation years about how she took on the job is to broadview nestle pretty few quick to take a picture, go double grade. you have to go so good on that. ah, who is the aggressor today? i'm authorizing the additional strong sanctions today. russia is the country with the most sanctions imposed against it. a number that's constantly growing. a list of course. sure. as we speak on the bill in your senior mostly mine the we're, we're banding all imports of russian oil and gas, new g, a g proposed with regard to joe by imposing these sanctions on russia has destroyed the american economy. so there's your boomerang,

ah, ah, the global financial system is shaken by a plunge in the top of switzerland, 2nd largest bank renewing fears of the next world wide financial crisis. russia minister of defense calls american drone flight near russia, border provocative as pentagon officials contact their russian counterparts for the 1st time in my after the american you ab crash in the black sea and leanne are outraged by the italian government. this tend to blame the european migration prices on the russian private military group. wagner. for me, what pushes african, the path of europe is the under development of different african.