The Opponent Elon Musk Really Faces
He has funded opposition. And you’re paying for it.
Aside from the self-forming woke battalions, Elon Musk has another opponent as he works to remake Twitter: the federal government, including the military. As Twitter attempts greater openness, government money is piling up on the other side of the scale, fighting for a restricted discourse.
I’ve written about this before. Federal funding in science and in military intelligence, at the very least, is flooding into projects that aim to limit the discourse on social media. Many federally funded projects explicitly target populism, or the related problem of people who question the experts. Take a moment to look over this $2.7 million NSF grant to a team of researchers at George Washington University, “grounded in best practices from trauma care,” and I apologize but the all-caps text is from the grant document. Read this very carefully, and keep going:
THIS PROJECT WILL DEVELOP EXPERT VOICES TOGETHER (EVT), A SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM THAT PROVIDES REAL-TIME SUPPORT TO EXPERTS EXPERIENCING ONLINE HARASSMENT. THE PROJECT WILL INITIALLY FOCUS ON SUPPORTING JOURNALISTS, LATER EXPANDING ITS REACH TO OTHER EXPERT COMMUNITIES. EVT AIMS TO SUPPORT EXPERTS IN MOMENTS OF CRISIS, WHILE ALSO BUILDING INDIVIDUAL, ORGANIZATIONAL, AND SOCIETAL CAPACITY TO PREVENT AND MITIGATE HARMS FROM ONLINE ABUSE AND HARASSMENT IN THE LONG TERM. THE TEAM OF SCIENTISTS, TECHNICAL SPECIALISTS, PSYCHOLOGISTS, AS WELL AS CIVIL SOCIETY AND MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES WILL BRING TOGETHER THEIR EXPERTISE IN A WIDE RANGE OF FIELDS INCLUDING MIS-/DISINFORMATION STUDIES, DATA ETHICS, SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, EXPERIMENTAL AND CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, CASE MANAGEMENT, JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION PRACTICE AND RESEARCH TO CREATE A RAPID-RESPONSE SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM THAT SUPPORTS JOURNALISTS AND OTHER EXPERTS FACING ONLINE ABUSE AND HARASSMENT. THE SYSTEM WILL COMPRISE A SECURE, RAPID-RESPONSE TECHNICAL PLATFORM, SUPPORT FROM TRAINED CASE MANAGERS, AND AN INTERVENTION TOOLKIT. TAILORED TO MEET THE SPECIFIC NEEDS OF EACH USER, THE EVT TOOLKIT WILL OFFER A MENU OF OPTIONS, INCLUDING: (1) PERSONALIZED ASSISTANCE WITH DIGITAL SAFETY AND SECURITY, (2) SUPPORT MONITORING AND REPORTING ABUSE, AND (3) HELP IDENTIFYING AND BUILDING A COMMUNITY CARE SYSTEM.
So when Dr. Expert feels disrespected on Twitter, federally funded teams of “trained case managers” are available to assist with the response. Elon Musk has expensive and organized critics, with government money.
This week, Musk has come under steady fire from Caroline Orr Bueno, a postdoc at the University of Maryland:
As I’ve written before (more than once) Caroline Orr Bueno’s postdoc is at ARLIS, the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security, which is mostly funded by the military intelligence community, and principally associated with the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
So the Washington Post picks up a stupid claim from a researcher at a military intelligence-funded think tank, and the federal government pays for the news. (Bizarrely, Caroline Orr Bueno’s dissertation was about prenatal smoking cessation, the perfect credential for a military-funded researcher to rant about QAnon and bunnies.)
So.
There’s a large and expensive army of government-funded researchers in think tanks and universities all over the country whose job — as experts — is to shitpost about Elon Musk, and to deluge Twitter with complaints from “trained case managers” who represent people who don’t like the platform or want open discourse on it.
What we know about so far is almost certainly a small piece of the total federal funding for the control of, and intervention in, social media, as other agencies — the Department of Homeland Security, for example, and the other intelligence agencies — surely also fund social media work. Bottom line: There’s little doubt that the federal government is spending tens of millions of dollars a year to intervene against social media companies and messages.
That’s what Elon Musk is facing.
Conversely, it’s also what we’re facing.
"There’s little doubt that the federal government is spending tens of millions of dollars a year to intervene against social media companies and messages."
All told, I bet you are off by at least one order of magnitude. And when you add in all of the other money used by our government to nudge/regulate/control and wage war against us, we are probably funding our own demise to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars annually.