Social Media Giants Continue To Shirk Responsibility: Garrity on Bloomberg Radio
Updated: Apr 23, 2021
Bloomberg Markets AM with Pimm Fox and Lisa Abramowicz.
GUEST: David Garrity, CEO of GVA Research, on how social media giants continue to shirk responsibility in policing their content.
To listen to the replay, click here.
Mueller Indictment Puts Spotlight On Social Media As Tool Of Russian Disinformation Efforts:
While there may be some debate as to whether the 13 individuals and 3 organizations named in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Fri 2/16/18 indictment will ever be brought to trial, it is nevertheless incontrovertible that the 37-page document spelled out in exacting detail the essential facilitating role that U.S. social media companies – Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR) – played in allowing a Russian government-sponsored entity, the Internet Research Agency, to establish and operate thousands of fake accounts from which to engage in what the Russian government terms, “active measures”, otherwise known as propaganda. The indictment indicates the Internet Research Agency began its planning efforts for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election in 2014, shortly after the overthrow of the Ukrainian government wherein Russia lost a valuable client in President Victor Yanukovych, and as indicated elsewhere these efforts continue to the present following the recent Parkland, FL school mass-shooting. State-sponsored propaganda is nothing new as a means to prosecute conflict by non-violent means. However, the extent to which U.S. social media companies have disclaimed any legal, moral or social responsibility in asserting they have no obligation to police their platforms and user base for fraudulent content or fake users makes them at a minimum tools to Russian disinformation and as such complicit in undermining the liberal democratic system that has nurtured them. Social media, it is quite clear, acts a force multiplier for Russian active measure campaigns, putting propaganda on steroids.