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Former US Spy Chief Calls for 'Filtering' of Social Media

posted by n1 on Thursday June 08 2017, @06:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the safe-spaces dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

As governments around the world face the ongoing threat of extremism, US ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says tech companies have a social "responsibility" to take better care of what appears on their platforms.

And he says companies should go as far as filtering their feeds and opening encryption access.

Speaking today at the National Press Club in Canberra, Australia, the head of the US intelligence community during the Obama administration said the issue was controversial, but Silicon Valley needed to play ball on national security.

"I do think there is a role to play here in some screening and filtering of what appears in social media," he said.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @07:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @07:06PM (#522743)

    Actually I think that is a great example.

    In a world without the internet, Trump would never have won. Obviously you may not like him, but he is a product of a strong anti-establishment sentiment that's been growing in the US for many years now - on both sides of the aisle. But without the bidirectional communication enabled by the internet, outsiders never stood a chance. The media destroys them and underplays their support. People, in turn, begin to feel like maybe not that many other people like them either and so end up voting against their preferred candidate for the sake of the 'least unpreferred candidate that is electable.' It's something we've seen play out time and again on both sides. That is a product of unidirectional messaging. It is capable of misleading people and having them do things they otherwise would not.

    If the DNC hadn't been so heavily manipulated, we'd have had an election between Sanders and Trump - two people who just a decade ago would have likely struggled to get 10% of the vote. This is the big difference in bidirectional vs unidirectional messaging. Clinton is a product of a time gone past when saying all the right things to select groups (even when said things contradict one another), giving all heavily focus tested answers (my favorite book is the bible!), and then finally capping it off with some dirt about your opponent from a decade ago. Remember John Kerry and the 'Swiftboat Veterans of America'? Idiotic stuff, but it worked. That is the power of undirectional messaging and what groups in power have typically been able to rely upon.

    Hillary announced her running on Twitter. That's evidence she understood, or was told, that times had changed. Yet she ran her campaign like it was ten years ago. Blame a corrupt DNC. Blame an out of touch politician running an idiotic campaign. But Trump did not 'win' this election, she lost it. Even as the voting population increased by millions Hillary managed to get fewer votes than Obama did for his second term election. That's just simply quite pathetic.