A week of Committees and Hearings, pop-corn delights of bullies in full flow

A week of Committees and Hearings, pop-corn delights of bullies in full flow, their flawed arguments exposed, their tactics revealed, their bile discharged in one case to a patient, calm and willing witness and in the other aimed at a patient, calm and willing Committee.

If you ever need to watch something to remind yourself you are not a bully, that you'd prefer to not have to vote for bullies, the combined 1O hours of public legislative broadcast questioning under oath  of the past few days might have something to offer.

To be honest, I didn't buy any pop-corn, and I watched less than three hours of both combined. Others watched it, and reviewed it so that I, lazily, languidly, did not have to.

To have watched it all, live, would have been too much for heart. Heartbreakers. 

The drama.

Boris Johnson and The House of Commons Privileges Committee.


On one side of 'the pond' we had a High Official ex-Prime Minister being given a chance to speak his defence, facing an allegation he intentionally lied to Parliament.

Johnson, ex-Pm, Brexiteer Virus Spreader, ex-Mayor, of Bridge to Nowhere infamy, Press Pundit Hack blustered and obfuscated and tried to bring in the entire Civil Service as part of his defence as he dished up shared blame by association. Johnson's tactic - "If I can't blind them with brilliance, I must baffle them with bullshit."

And so he tried on the "I'm obviously an idiot." without saying "Obviously, I'm an idiot." ploy. Innocence by virtue of stupidity.

He wagged his fingers, he accused the committee of bias, he opined he would not accept their ruling if it went against him. That and so much else. Raw Sewage in the river.

Apparently expensive treatment advice, piping at 5K£ an hour, to no avail. 

It was exhausting, listening to slippery eel talk - the only thing he didn't do was use a Latin allusion. I might have missed it.

Tik Tok, The US Congressional Hearings and a ban

On the other side of 'pond' we see High Officials of the Government, carrying out a version of The Salem Witch Trials, attacking a patient, composed and willing witness, denying him the chance to fully speak in his own defence, or indeed his companies defence. 

TikTok is being accused, without foundation, of being an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, engaged in nefarious operations designed to undermine The American Way by influencing America's children. They are so accused as a cover for lack of legislative regulatory protection of private data.

TikTok's response is to politely spend 1.5 Billion dollars to store all data on US Soil, under US independent Third Party control, with an all American workforce. And much else that sets a new high bar for regulation of Social Media platforms industry.

Good strategy. A strategy that the likes of Facebook,  Google, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube and a myriad of social on-line interactive user content generation platforms that carry advertising would rather not be put in place.

Surplus Behavioural Data

The real meat of this matter, privacy and the collection of what is known as 'surplus behavioural data' - in short the entire inadvertent on-line activity and behaviour of each and every user - and it's analysis and utilisation is, of course, off the books. Because there's the advertisers alchemical gold - an analysis of current observed and measured human behaviour trails among users of the digital online content creation wannabes, categorised into thousands of very specific characterisations, many of them emotionally charged, easily triggered, vulnerable to manipulation, or for other purposes. A dollar sign on every bias. Advertisers will pay well for that access. Google will never sell it's trove of 'surplus behavioural data'. The other data we create as content, etc, is largely already in the open. All our financials, company info, car licence etc have long been shared, even prior to interwebs.

Personal data, most of which is already available for a fee, is not the issue at the heart of the Internet of Beef.

The Internet of Beef.

The online argument marketing community generating arguments that never resolve into coherence, based on biases, in order to increase engagement so more eyes see more adds. As have done most News papers ever. It's nothing new here.

It was discovered again via the emergence of online Forums and platforms of any and every kind where eyes are on screens and typing to each other, and it very quickly became integrated in to Capitalist dominance of the interwebs as a marketing tool. A dollar on every bias. Hey, people can even design products no one needs, out of toxic materials, that a certain variation on biases might trigger a sale, and make just enough useless stuff to saturate that market, extracting wealth from vulnerability. This is serious stuff, my readers. One cannot look away. This cannot stand unregulated, at any level.

Surplus Behavioural Data allows mass study of specific vulnerabilities, biases, emotional state, psychological state, moods, impulses, fears, triggers, and has led to a categorisation system which the tech companies hold close to their chest. They do not sell that data.

The social media companies sell the ability to target any selection of the thousands of specific categories they have generated by analysing trillions of hours of behavioural data, and send advertisers content to targets presenting with those variable attributes, thus increasing likelihood of a confirmed sales to ad placed ratio. That is their business, the provision of free tools to create content and share it - the user/consumer experience - is their draw.

So back to TikTok's faux spy trial... and the sophisticated, layered bully tactics routinely deployed de riguer when one is plainly in the wrong, in public. Unapologetically. Self righteously. Legislators? 

Remember Johnson above?  Exactly that.

Tactics

One tactic was for an official to cut short his or her speech, having made and allegation or attribution, so that Mr. Chew could not take time to answer the question, to explore it for better clarity. Bloody rude behaviour anywhere. Mr. Chew was stoic. I think the Congress has bitten off more than it can chew. We'll see why below.

Here's a more moderate instance, there were many more, in quick succession, that were downright repulsive and arrogant.


A staring, glowering semi-circle of angry men and women, nursing a well paid anger, implying that Mr. chew and his company  might well be supporting genocidal , secretly grooming American children for the Chinese Communist Party, to undermine American culture; they accused his company of numerous other wild conspiracy theories. The same group had within it people who did not understand how WiFi works as part of the internet.

Congressman A : "If I have TikTok on my mobile phone, does TikTok have access to my Wifi?"

@cnetdotcom 😳😳😳……… #TikTok #TikTokNews #Congress #TikTokCEO #ShouChew #Wifi #internet #congressionalhearing #TikTokban #tiktokhearing ♬ original sound - CNET


The viewing public : "WTF? Did he really ask that question? Really? OMG!"

Case Closed. Ban TikTok!

Or this?

@djkirstyjay #duet with @The Herman Cain Awards #tiktokhearing #tiktoktrial #tiktoktrials #tiktokusa #algorithmtiktok #algorithm #texas ♬ original sound - The Herman Cain Awards


Knowledgeable they are not.

5 hours of this kind of behaviour, with some attempts by Mr. Chew to present a rational, evidenced case, and irrationality and conspiracy theory being presented as a righteous rebuttal of TikTok's case.

Belief and bile. Bible. Make believe, Mystical World. Fantasy and Imagination. Patience and equity. These are things I think about. A life examined and all that wisdom guff.

The presence of cruelty and bullying eradicates wisdom as the base of the dynamic, which is not restored in full until the cruelty and bullying is stopped, and further harm prevented, with an eye to a long term solution. Prevention is better than the cure, though in the case of FacebookGoogle vs TikTok, what they are preventing is a mature regulatory system for all social media, one that is democratic, transparent and effective. 

Backstory - money cows chased.

Turns out TikTok had taken away a huge share of the US and Global advertising market.  From Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.... Ooops!

A better product gains more users because it is a genuinely better product for sharing social content, in terms of it's ease of use, ability to share, algorithm designed to enable natural virality. The users inadvertently decide what is most popular, most effective. And yes, it is designed, like all social media to draw eyes to advertisements. TikTok intentionally chooses a more democratic content selection, Period.

All the social media platforms sell advertising access. That is the business model. They sell access to users who create content who, whilst viewing content, will see advertisements. Simples.

TikTok's algorithm is much more attuned to emergence, democratisation of content feed, and the deliberate restriction of content that is inciting harm in any way is part of what enables that democratisation.

TikTok has made it clear in their current operations that they are going to set new standards, beyond those in place for the social media industry, to a higher standard. Facebook et al do not want those higher standards turned into commercial legislation.

That's the service that has drawn 15O million US users in. Democratic flow of information. It's what 'the interwebs' was redeployed to do, away from the Military Industrial Complexes hegemony. 

Now who is likely the most pissed off about all of this loss of advertising market share?  Who might want to kill the neighbours golden goose, out of spite and malign business practice? Hmmm... Those who will lose profits, and those who will lose voters might form an alliance in such a situation.

Turns out someone spent a small fortune generating conspiracy theories about TikTok, and making them go viral.

Turns out someone spent a small fortune on a number of political lobbying firms, and donated to certain public representatives.

For profit.

Now, who would that be?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/30/23003168/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory-news-column-campaign-gop

"Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been paying one of the most prominent Republican consulting firms to run a nationwide campaign to sow distrust about one of the company’s top competitors, TikTok, according to a new report from The Washington Post on Wednesday.

The firm, Targeted Victory, reportedly planted op-eds and letters to the editor in major local and regional newspapers across the country. A Targeted Victory director told staff that the firm needed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to emails obtained by The Post.

“TikTok is the real threat”

News of Facebook’s decision to hire the firm comes only a few weeks after the company declared that it was losing users for the first time in its 18-year history. Meta’s recent earnings report said that Facebook’s active users dropped by almost 500,000 at the end of last year. 

Several of Targeted Victory’s op-eds contained links to negative news coverage about TikTok and were often bylined by influential community figures and politicians, including Democrats. The Post reported that none of the columns disclosed their connection to the Facebook-funded firm.

Over the last few years, Facebook has been under fire by Congress for allegedly holding an illegal monopoly in the social media industry. During a 2020 hearing with tech CEOs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, lawmakers cited internal company documents suggesting that Zuckerberg would go “destroy mode” if Instagram, a then-nascent competitor, refused to be sold to the social media giant. "

Anyway, that's so not speculative. This is all well documented. It's an interesting story indeed. How they do it.

And of course, Meta contributed donated funding to Democrats and Republicans alike to help make their case water tight, and carefully built their political combat troops, up, to fight for their Freedom from healthy competition.

Free Market my arse!

In any setting if bullying is happening and not being stopped, Freedom has ended. Period.

So what I think about these two visual overloads of bullies in action is this - in both cases we see what bullies do when they internalise political power as if it was a part of themselves, at which point it becomes blind entitlement. The freedom to make false accusations in public, to repeat known falsehoods set out as rumours as if they are true in public as their natural, God given right. The freedom to shout down the person representing TikTok, caricaturing him as a Chinese Communist Party asset for the public gallery since there is no verifiable, reliable evidence supporting that claim at all.

The Freedom to bully, using language to bully, to incite more bullying. Without consequence. By right.

Indict Putin and Blair and Bush?

That said, the matter of Johnson is minor compared to the outstanding matter of Blair, the War Criminal. Seeing as no indication that Parliament will indict Blair exists, and certainly StarmerFriedLabour won't, Parliament and the parties involved remain as unindicted War Criminals. Make of that what you will.

It's a mess. The whole hierarchy cult of wealth, power and might is a mess, and it's causing so much harm.

Whatever you may think, the fact is that I didn't mess it up, and you probably didn't mess it up, and there are those who are messing it up, big time.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

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