The Weekly Weird #38

Zuck comes clean, Telegram gets busted, UK government "pauses" free speech, America's first AI mayor (maybe), Afghan women get Tali-banned

Welcome once more to your weekly dose of dystopian doings, served fresh and hot from the bowels of the mines of madness!

First, a brief public service announcement: This Sunday’s episode will be a Summer Special, a departure from our regular format in which I report from the field. I call this mysterious innovation…*drum roll*…a ‘field report’. Fear not! Our regular format of long-form one-on-one conversation will return imminently thereafter. I am curious to hear what you think of the field report approach though, so please give me feedback, good, bad, or indifferent.

Second, let’s get to it!

Zuck Comes Clean

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO and grown-up version of the child robot David from the film A.I. (see photo below), stunned people who hate reality by submitting a letter to the Congressional House Judiciary Committee confessing that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor content.

The letter, shared gleefully by the House Judiciary GOP X account, admitted things that Zuckerberg had already told Joe Rogan two years previously, and which were obvious to anyone with a functioning cerebrum, namely that “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured [Meta] for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration…when [they] didn’t agree.”

Exhibit A:

The decision to “temporarily demote” the Hunter Biden laptop story makes an appearance as well, framed as a response to a pre-bunking effort by the FBI which, unsurprisingly, turned out itself to be bunk.

For the uninitiated, “pre-bunking” is a technique used by dis/mis/malinformation specialists in which you tell someone in advance of exposure that what they are about to see or hear is a lie, in order to prevent them from believing it. Whether what you say to create the desired effect is true or not, or whether the thing you are saying is a lie is in fact a lie or not, appears to often be irrelevant to such self-appointed arbiters of dis/mis/malinformation.

À la Zuckerberg:

It’s since been made clear that the reporting [on Hunter Biden’s laptop] was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.

The media response to Zuckerberg’s stunning admission of the obvious ran the gamut from incredulity to empretzelment.

The Daily Beast ran with this definitely objective headline:

Vox went with a contortive formulation:

The Washington Post insidiously altered the meaning of what Zuck actually wrote in their reformulation, implying that the regret was related to actual misinformation, not “humor and satire”:

Matt Taibbi at

Racket News

summed it up from a slightly different and less partisan angle:

Like other tech CEOs, Zuckerberg finds himself between a rock and a hard place. From one side, he sees subpoenas and investigations of censorship. From the other, he faces strident demands on content from authorities whose idea of “accountability” has gone beyond crippling penalties to detention.

[…]

This is a classic Hobson’s choice. Between complying with an investigation into government overreach and having to bend over forever for rapacious authorities who are also bone-stupid groupthinkers who’d surely destroy firms like Facebook and Rumble if left to their devices (hint: customers won’t knowingly rush to sign up to be spied on and fed political propaganda), any CEO with an instinct for self-preservation will take the first door every time.

Beyond ruffling the feathers of partisan hacks, and acting as a shot across the bow for the censorious tendencies of an incoming administration post-election, the outcome of Zuckerberg’s letter so far appears negligible, if only because those who found it surprising might tend not to believe its revelations are a bad thing anyway, and those who weren’t shocked already suspected what was up.

Let’s revisit Matt Taibbi’s mention of “detention”…

Telegram Gets Busted

Pavel Durov, billionaire CEO of Telegram and Prince of Persia look-a-like, has been arrested in France for all the shady things other people have done on his encrypted¹ messaging app.

Here’s a photo of him demonstrating the width of a British staircase:

The Guardian opined sniffily in an article titled What is Telegram, and why has its founder Pavel Durov been arrested?:

Telegram has long appealed to communities who haven’t found a home on more mainstream platforms; cryptocurrency advocates, anti-vax activists and QAnon believers have all migrated to the platform after crackdowns on social networks such as Facebook. 

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the leading pearl-clutcher of British newspapers lumping together advocates for peer-to-peer transactions, people askance as to the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines, and individuals who believe that children are being harvested for adrenochrome by a Satanic global elite. Surely a game of “one of these is not like the other” is called for?

The Guardian cuts to the chase twelve paragraphs in:

The investigation concerns crimes related to illicit transactions, child sexual abuse, fraud and the refusal to communicate information to authorities. The arrest warrant was issued by OFMIN, a French child protection agency, the group’s secretary general said in a post on LinkedIn.

It is extremely rare to hold the providers of web services liable for the actions of their users, and rarer still to append personal liability. What remains unclear is whether the alleged failures of Telegram are extraordinary, or if the escalation is instead on the part of the French authorities.

In a statement on Sunday, Telegram said Durov “had nothing to hide” and that “it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform”.

Meanwhile, the AP, in an article with a different byline but an eerily similar title (What is Telegram and why was its CEO arrested in Paris?), adds some colour:

Durov, who was born in Russia, spent much of his childhood in Italy and is a citizen of France, Russia, the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, and the United Arab Emirates. He was taken into custody at Paris-Le Bourget Airport in France on Saturday after arriving from Azerbaijan and released Wednesday after four days of questioning. He was ordered to pay 5 million euros for bail and directed to report to a police station twice a week, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.

Begging the question as to why media outlets feel the need to explain what Telegram is, AP expands:

Telegram says it has more than 950 million active users. It is widely used in France as a messaging tool, including by some officials in the presidential palace and in the ministry behind the investigation into Durov. But French investigators have also found the app has been used by Islamic extremists and drug traffickers.

Uh oh. Extremists also breathe air and use toilets. Coincidence? Ban the bog! Demand ID for inhalation!

The Stanford Internet Observatory, a noted pillar of the Censorship Industrial Complex, provided an expert to explain why its problematic that people say things on Telegram that don’t get ratted out to the Man.

Compared to other messaging platforms, Telegram is “less secure (and) more lax in terms of policy and detection of illegal content,” said David Thiel, a Stanford University researcher, who has investigated the use of online platforms for child exploitation, at its Internet Observatory.

In addition, Telegram “appears basically unresponsive to law enforcement,” Thiel said, adding that messaging service WhatsApp “submitted over 1.3 million CyberTipline reports in 2023 (and) Telegram submits none.”

Alex Hern at The Guardian put out another piece on Durov’s arrest that includes a mention of the tension in the messaging space when it comes to governments being mad about citizens having the ability to communicate privately:

WhatsApp, Signal and Apple’s iMessage are built from the ground up to prevent anyone other than the intended recipient from reading content shared on the services. That includes the companies that run the platforms – as well as any law enforcement that might request their help.

It’s caused no end of friction between some of the largest tech companies in the world and the governments that regulate them but, for the time being, the tech companies appear to have won the main fight. No one is seriously demanding end-to-end encryption be outlawed any more, with regulators and critics instead calling for approaches such as “client-side scanning” to try to police messaging services another way.

We’ve covered what “client-side scanning” entails in previous Weirds - it means that your phone is monitored locally for problematic content, since the platform provider doesn’t have access on the server side. Ever heard of a company using a key-logger or screen-grabber to track employees and make sure they’re working? Fancy having the government, or an agency empowered by government, doing that on your computer and phone to make sure you’re not getting sexy, sassy, or saucy in ways they disapprove of?

Indicating what authorities seem to expect from companies these days, yet another Guardian piece mentioned the following (emphasis mine):

A senior official at Ofmin, a French agency set up last year to prevent violence against children, said Durov’s arrest was linked to Telegram’s failure to properly fight crime on the app…

Forgive me for living in the past, but isn’t crime-fighting supposed to be what the police do? Since when do we expect tech platforms to be extensions of law enforcement? Failing to comply with due process is obviously a different story, but expecting proactive monitoring and crime-fighting from businesses seems…ungood?

The BBC quoted a panellist on Russian state TV:

“All these accusations against Durov sound absurd,” one political analyst in the studio declared. “Accusing him of all the crimes that are committed on his platform is like accusing [France's] President Macron of all the crimes that happen in France. It’s the same logic.”

All eyes turn towards X as the next target for a crackdown on online speech. Elon Musk’s response has reportedly been to blaze a fattie.

UK Government “Pauses” Free Speech

Okay, I’m being hyperbolic. Not all free speech.

Yet.

The Independent with the basics:

Labour’s move to pause legislation which could see universities and student unions fined for failing to uphold freedom of speech has been branded “chilling” by a former Conservative minister.

The government has decided to put a hold on the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 “in order to consider options, including its repeal”, education secretary Bridget Phillipson announced on Friday.

The legislation, which was set to come into force next week, would have allowed the Office for Students (OfS) to sanction higher education providers and student unions in England if they did not sufficiently protect freedom of speech.

The Guardian, characterising the legislation as a Tory thing, offered the headline Labour puts Tories’ ‘freedom of speech’ law for universities on hold and included the full quote from Phillipson:

“I have written to colleagues separately about my decision to stop further commencement of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, in order to consider options, including its repeal.”

Demonstrating that the gamut of free speech support in Britain’s media runs from bad to worse, Research Professional News had this headline: Labour pause on free speech act labelled ‘sensible’.

From the article:

The act passed in May last year, and offers people who feel they have been no-platformed by universities or student groups a legal avenue to seek financial compensation.

The legislation also established a “free speech tsar” at the OfS to oversee campus free speech issues. The inaugural holder of the post is University of Cambridge philosophy professor Arif Ahmed.

However, the proposals were unpopular with universities, with many experts—including university leaders and members of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords—claiming that the legislation was unnecessary. Other raised concerns that legal cases could prove so costly for universities that it might discourage them from inviting controversial speakers to campus in the first place.

Quoted in The Independent, Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary in the previous government, didn’t mince words in criticising the move:

“The Labour Party fought us every step of the way when we legislated to protect freedom of speech in universities. This is a taste of what is to come.”

What is “to come”?

Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has decided to preside over the return of the ‘non-crime hate incident,’ a concept so nebulous that even writing about it is difficult, like bottling fog.

From The Telegraph:

She is understood to be committed to reversing the Tories’ decision to downgrade the monitoring of non-crime hate incidents, specifically in relation to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, so they can be logged by police.

To help you try to understand what exactly the crime or non-crime being described here is, let’s take a look at the Metropolitan Police definition of “hate crime” and “hate incident” (emphasis mine):

A hate crime is defined as 'Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person's race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.'

A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.

Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.

So, for clarity, a hate crime or hate incident is anything that any person thinks is a hate crime or hate incident, regardless of the perception of the persons involved (or any actual harm), and regardless of the presence of any evidence indicating hostility or prejudice.

More from The Telegraph:

A Home Office spokesman said: “The Home Office has committed to reverse the decision of the previous government to downgrade the monitoring of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate, at a time when rates of those incidents have increased.

“It is vital that the police can capture data relating to non-crime hate incidents when it is proportionate and necessary to do so in order to help prevent serious crimes which may later occur.

“We are carefully considering how best to protect individuals and communities from hate whilst also balancing the need to protect the fundamental right to free speech.”

Why exactly do the police need to “capture data” on non-crimes? Anyway...

The Telegraph again:

The move [to re-emphasise non-crime hate incidents] follows a surge in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents after the Hamas terror attack on Israel on Oct 7. Anti-semitic incidents hit a record of 4,103 last year, double the previous high, while Islamophobic incidents tripled to 2,010 in a similar period.

Note the way that anti-Semitism is placed alongside Islamophobia in these articles and statements, making it clear that they are equally serious and threatening to minorities in the UK.

Are they?

To put the statistics in context, there are approximately 3.99 million Muslims and 277,000 Jews in Britain according to the 2021 census. If all the reported incidents were against Muslims or Jews directly, personally, and uniquely, 0.05% or 1 in 2000 British Muslims would have been affected, versus 1.48% or 1 in 67 British Jews, a ratio of 30 to 1². So by population size, one could argue that anti-Semitism is thirty times worse in Britain than Islamophobia, on an in-group per capita basis.

None of this is intended to play down or excuse hateful behaviour, or suggest that one person is hurt any less than another by prejudice. That said, one can get a flavour of how a perception of a ‘two-tier’ policing system is fed when anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are invariably mentioned together at all times, while the former affects thirty times more of a minority fourteen times smaller than the latter.

When one of the ‘protestors’ in the aftermath of the Southport murders, a 61 year-old man, was given an 18 month sentence because he shouted “Who the f*** is Allah?” and made “threatening gestures” at police, it made the papers not only because it was seen as heavy-handed for what amounted to unsavoury speech, but because in a certain way it raised the spectre of blasphemy laws returning to Britain under the guise of cultural sensitivity. If it’s a hate crime to throw shade at Allah or his Prophet, surely the same would/could/should apply to Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism etc. Would enforcing that help balance “the need to protect the fundamental right to free speech”?

The closest thing to a definition of Islamophobia is from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, which took two years to settle on the following (on page 7 of their 78-page report, called Defining Islamophobia):

Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.

After the report was published, the London Borough of Camden published a handout including the definition and a list of contemporary examples explaining what Islamophobia would look like in practice. It makes for fascinating reading, especially when paired with this.

The Labour government have now mooted the adoption of a formal legal definition of Islamophobia, possibly the one given by the APPG, in response to the violence and unrest over the summer.

From The Telegraph:

Lord Pickles, a former communities secretary, told The Telegraph: “A definition of anti-Muslim hatred or Islamophobia is a very good idea and everybody agrees it should be done.

“The problem is that there’s nothing out there that is really satisfactory. Many a minister has started out with a good intention of doing this and they’ve just found themselves completely bogged down with unexpected and unpredictable consequences.”

So it goes. How can you thread the needle if what members of a religion consider hatred, broader society would consider mockery, blasphemy, or mere bad taste?

This is the difficulty with regulating speech. No matter how well-intentioned, how intelligently approached, how delicately phrased, efforts to limit speech inevitably reach an event horizon between the vast expanse of the free speech universe and the black hole of censorship and authoritarianism. We cross the line into that dense abyss at our peril.

America’s First AI Mayor (Maybe)

The city of Cheyenne, Wyoming is in the market for a new mayor, and one of the candidates wants it to be a generative AI.

From CoinTelegraph:

Victor Miller recently threw his hat into the ring for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, pledging to manage the 65,000-person city exclusively with a generative AI bot he built himself — called VIC, or Virtual Integrated Citizen.

“Vote Vic Meat Avatar” was not on my 2024 election bingo card, but I’m here for it.

The Washington Post reported on the grilling VIC received from attendees at a campaign event.

“Making decisions that affect many people requires a careful balance of data-driven insights and human empathy,” VIC said in a male-sounding voice. “Here’s how I would approach it,” it added, before ticking off a six-part plan that included using AI to gather data on public opinion and responding to constituents at town halls.

How safe would this be?

CoinTelegraph again:

“It would be highly irresponsible at this point in time to use generative artificial intelligence for any moderate-to-high risk decision-making in government,” Julian Cardarelli, CEO of GovCore, a government tech firm, told Cointelegraph. “I would rule it out entirely for anything that requires an informed decision to be made with such a risk profile.”

From WaPo again:

“This incident in Wyoming seems to be testing the frontiers of local regulation,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, who researches AI and democracy at the Brookings Institution. “While OpenAI may have certain policies against using its model for campaigning, other companies do not, so it makes shutting down the campaign nearly impossible.”

The issue is not limited to this race. A regulatory vacuum has meant that even when companies do have policies, enforcement is patchy. OpenAI shut down the ChatGPT-powered chatbot of long-shot presidential hopeful Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, only after The Post reported on it. And in Britain, an AI investor is running a campaign for a seat in Parliament on a vow to legislate with an AI bot as “co-pilot.”

The British AI investor referred to is of course the ‘Real’ Steve Endacott, my guest in Episode 116.

How would the division of labour between VIC and its Meat Avatar work?

WaPo:

As mayor of the 65,000-person city, Miller would go to ribbon-cutting ceremonies and shake hands. VIC would act as executive, deciding whether to sign or veto legislation. Miller would facilitate VIC’s responses to constituents’ emails and pass on information he learned from in-person events. VIC would do everything else, so long as there was a good WiFi connection.

Of all the potential downsides and criticisms, perhaps the simplest and most direct came from a professor interviewed by the Washington Post:

Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, compared a chatbot running the city to driving an imaginary car.

“It is hard for me to talk about the ‘risks’ of having an AI mayor,” Narayanan said in an email. “It’s like asking about the risks of replacing a car with a big cardboard cutout of a car. Sure, it looks like a car, but the ‘risk’ is that you no longer have a car.”

So would an AI mayor even be a mayor? An (alleged) IBM presentation slide from the 1970s has been doing the rounds recently and sums it up quite well…

Afghan Women Get Tali-Banned

Historical re-enactors and aspiring beard oil models the Taliban have made the news with “a 114-page document from the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” that destroys whatever vestiges of women’s rights survived their 2021 re-taking of power in Afghanistan.

From Reuters:

The 35-article morality law was officially enacted and published on Wednesday after being ratified by Supreme Spiritual Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, said Justice Ministry spokesperson Barakatullah Rasoli.

"According to this law, the Ministry (for Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue) is obligated to promote good and forbid evil in accordance with Islamic Sharia," the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

The requirements include women to wear attire that fully covers their bodies and faces and bars men from shaving their beards as well as from skipping prayer and religious fasts.

Penalties for violations included "advice, warnings of divine punishment, verbal threats, confiscation of property, detention for one hour to three days in public jails, and any other punishment deemed appropriate," the Justice Ministry added.

Here’s a video on the new laws, from The Indian Express:

The head Talibanner, Hibatullah Akhundzada, apparently cooked up this fever dream of small-dick energy from his bolthole in Kandahar, achieving a rare feat of contravening “all 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

From The Guardian:

Women’s voices are also deemed to be potential instruments of vice and so will not be allowed to be heard in public under the new restrictions. Women must also not be heard singing or reading aloud, even from inside their houses.

“Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face, and body,” the new laws state.

Men will also be required to cover their bodies from their navels to their knees when they are outside their homes.

From now on, Afghan women are also not allowed to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage, and taxi drivers will be punished if they agree to drive a woman who is without a suitable male escort.

Women or girls who fail to comply can be detained and punished in a manner deemed appropriate by Taliban officials charged with upholding the new laws.

Not long ago, I interviewed the dystopian novelist Christina Dalcher about her book VOX, set in a theocratic America where women are limited to speaking no more than 100 words per day. Now a version of that fictional dystopia is a reality for Afghanistan’s women, minus the electro-shock bracelet enforcing it at home in the novel.

Lest you think it was roses over there before this latest crackdown, bear in mind that:

Prior to the new “vice and virtue” laws, women and girls were already blocked from attending secondary school; banned from almost every form of paid employment; prevented from walking in public parks, attending gyms or beauty salons; and told to comply with a strict dress code.

Earlier this year, the Taliban also announced the reintroduction of the public flogging and stoning of women for adultery.

In case you were confused, that’s the bad stoning, with rocks, not the good kind of stoning.

DW elaborates on the horror:

The introduction of these laws signals not just control but a consolidation of the Taliban's authoritarian grip, said Fereshta Abbasi, a researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

[…]

Furthermore, they ban homosexuality, animal fighting, cultural celebrations, playing music in public and non-Muslim holidays, as well as the use of fireworks, among other things.

Abbasi pointed out that the Taliban's Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue enjoys enormous power and impunity.

The ministry said this month that it had dismissed over 280 security personnel over the past year for failure to grow a beard and detained more than 13,000 people for "immoral acts," in line with their interpretation of the Sharia, or Islamic law.

"In a situation where there is no such thing as a trial in Afghanistan, in most cases, members of this ministry can punish individuals directly, which violates most basic human rights laws and principles," Abbasi said.

This sobering YouTube short also gives an impression of what Afghanistan is like for women right now.

Quoting a local woman anonymously, DW shares the level of hopelessness being experienced by women under Taliban rule.

“As an Afghan woman, it is difficult to imagine living under these conditions. If I, as a working woman, feel oppressed, how must it be for women who primarily stay at home? We do not expect our situation to improve in the future, and we will be forced to take our own lives.”

On behalf of myself and, one would think, a lot of people around the world:

Ladies, please don’t. I hope there’s hope.

That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. Thanks for reading.

Outro music is this Reuters segment on Afghan women filming themselves singing in protest against the new law banning them from being heard in public (or even beyond the walls of their homes).

Stay sane, friends.

1. Or not.

2. Technically, 29.85 to 1, but forgive the rounding for the sake of brevity and clarity.