On October 11, Facebook announced the removal of 559 pages and 251 accounts from its service, accusing the account holders of “spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The purged users stand accused of posting “massive amounts of content … to drive traffic to their websites” with suspicious “timing ahead of US midterm elections.”

Facebook admits to “legitimate reasons” for such behavior — “it’s the bedrock of fundraising campaigns and grassroots organizations.” Not to mention the operations of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and a bunch of other users/pages which weren’t purged.

Facebook also admits that it has previously “enforced this policy against many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate …”

In other words, Facebook’s administrators are meddling in politics — including the 2018 US midterm elections — in the name of preventing meddling in politics.

Who benefits from the meddling? It doesn’t seem to fall along “left/right” lines in particular. The victims come from across the political spectrum — from Reverb Press on the left, to Right Wing News on the right, to the libertarian Free Thought Project — some with millions of Facebook followers.

The primary thread connecting victims of the purge seems to be that they are critics and/or opponents of the American political “mainstream” or “establishment.”

In a sense, this is nothing new. Even before Internet “social media,” the old guard “mainstream media” tended to draw fairly narrow lines on either side of the perceived political “center” or “consensus” and avoid coloring (or publishing e.g. reader letters that colored) very far outside those lines. One might support or oppose a tax increase, or even a particular tax, but opposing taxation in general? Why, that was just crazy and not worthy of consideration — or of column inches.

The Internet and social media threatened to change that. In fact, they DID change that … for a little while, at any rate. But now Facebook, Twitter et al. are part of the establishment, and they’re starting to act like it.

How can we fight that trend?

Some would have us classify social media as “public utilities” or something of the sort and regulate them as such. But who would regulate them? The very establishment in question.

On the other hand, it’s becoming clear that these companies are already looking more and more like extensions of the state — and the establishment the state serves — than like bona fide “private sector” actors.

What is to be done? From where I sit, the only real option is to see if the next generation of “social media” — sites/services like Diaspora, Mastodon, Minds, MeWe, Gab, et al. — can supersede Facebook and Twitter in the same way that Facebook and Twitter superseded print and television news and the more centralized/static site model of the older Internet.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The International Monetary Fund refers to cryptocurrency only once in its 215-page World Economic Outlook for October 2018, but that reference is telling: “Continued rapid growth of crypto assets could create new vulnerabilities in the international financial system.”

Ironically and counter-intuitively — but in my opinion not accidentally — that sentence is grouped in a paragraph  with worries about the potential of cyber warfare to “undermine cross-border payment systems and disrupt the flow of goods and services.”

Cryptocurrency, of course, is the perfect solution to “cross-border payment systems.” In terms of both movement and accounting, it simply ignores borders.  A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin — in Minneapolis, in Mumbai, in Moscow. And it can be moved between those three cities in a tiny fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort  it takes to set up wire transfers between bank accounts and to exchange dollars for rupees, or for rubles. All without government permission, too.

The “vulnerabilities” the IMF worries about are its own. Cryptocurrencies are, to varying degrees, resistant to supervision, surveillance, and regulation by entities like the IMF and its 189 member governments (the so-called “international financial system”).

Those governments (and their intermediary institutions like the IMF) fear money they can’t control. Who can blame them? The long history of central government banking is a history of money and markets easily subjected to taxation and political manipulation. Its purpose is to shear the sheep — that is, to clothe the ruling class at the expense of those who produce goods and services of actual value.

The brief history of cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a history of emerging financial (and, ultimately, political) freedom for the productive class. That’s its philosophical genesis and its technical goal: Putting wealth beyond the reach of the thieves and extortionists who call themselves “governments.” Crypto is, as the anarcho-syndicalists like to put it, “building the new world in the shell of the old.”

Some players in the crypto sector seek co-option by the existing “international financial system” — for example, seeking regulation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and its global equivalents.  They’re backing the wrong horse. The old “international financial system” will be replaced, not reformed.

The IMF’s purpose is not to facilitate “cross-border payment systems and … the flow of goods and services,” but to control them.  Fortunately, the time when that was even remotely possible is coming to an end.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

 

 

Amazon.com’s plans to establish  a pay minimum of $15 an hour for all its domestic workers (Day One: The Amazon Blog, October 2) come across as the real-life version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons turning his nuclear power plant into a community garden. The Internet sales Goliath is by far the largest company to have taken up a wage floor that is among the main demands of critics of its labor practices, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos inspiring Senator Bernie Sanders’s Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act. Sanders has pivoted to commending the same Bezos his “Stop BEZOS” proposal demonized.

Has the avowed socialist simply accumulated enough political power to beat up on business with a long-shot bill symbolizing the force of piecemeal lesser measures? Or has a well-meaning but impractical gesture lucked into sparking a real concession?

Critics point out that the specific mechanic of the Act — taxing larger companies the full amount their employees get from welfare programs — suffers from the perverse incentive of making it less worth employers’ while to hire the most impoverished applicants. Yet it is not simply the case, as Jonathan Chait protests, that “social welfare benefits workers, not their bosses.” In observing that measures seemingly championing the underdog can in fact become corporate welfare, Sanders is more perceptive than Chait. Sanders grasps the outlines of “corporate liberalism” as exposed by a half-century of research by historians like Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, and Joel Spring.

Amazon’s promise that “our public policy team will work with policymakers in Washington, D.C., to advocate for a higher federal minimum wage” is merely the latest example of dominant firms collaborating with government to design regulation they welcome because its costs fall most heavily on others. From safety measures (Kolko’s “The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916”), to transportation infrastructure (Kolko’s “Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916”), to workforce training (Spring’s “Education and the Rise of the Corporate State”), legislative mandates and standardized requirements stop competitors from doing things better for less, and often from even entering the market in the first place.

In attempting to take back such ill-gotten gains, the Stop BEZOS Act doesn’t go far enough. Money would be left in the pockets of the neediest by measures like the Mobilization for Incremental Tax Exemption — an across-the-board removal of the lowest income earners from the tax rolls endorsed by both William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism director Thomas Knapp and “Bernie: A Lifelong Crusade Against Wall Street & Wealth” author Darcy Richardson.

Opportunities to earn more would expand as structures of corporate liberalism recede. The book industry, for instance, would no longer be artificially routed through an Amazonian mega-river — on Beltway-built ships — but would tend to eddy around the communities it serves. It would look less like a centralized Amazon warehouse than like the local touch and personal service of year-old Kew & Willow Books of Queens, New York — founded by employees of a nearby closed Barnes & Noble with knowledge of the trade and the neighborhood.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Amazon’s $15 minimum pay is a hollow gesture,” by Joel Schlosberg, University of New Mexico Daily Lobo, 10/08/18
• “Can’t Stop the Bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 10/11/18
• “Can’t Stop the Bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 10/14/18
• “Can’t stop the bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Pahrump Valley [Nevada] Times, 11/07/18