Transparency in public discourse and the protection of privacy, revisited

I just finished listening to Sam Harris' latest podcast, an episode entitled The Information War. He talks with Renée DiResta, a government cyberwar analyst (and yes a statist) about her review of the evidence of Russian shitposting trolls.

It is worth listening to, no matter where you fall on the spectrum of opinion. DiResta alleges that there's no room for doubt any more that Russia has been infiltrating grassroots political movements via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

What I found funny when considering this was the ease at which anyone of those shitposting groups could influence this platform, if they thought it was a worthy target, which I think we have to assume they do not. There is a lot conspiratorial thinking here, a lot of people who are so suspicious that they employ magical thinking, jump to conclusions, and so on, to arrive at complete distrust. It is worrying to think how such profound levels of mistrust can be weaponized against not only the credulous but those in their circles.

Particularly striking was how (it is alleged) they "laundered" fake hacked emails through WikiLeaks (I'd like to see this substantiated), and ads through Facebook. DiResta says that the shitposters would sometimes reach out to others in their community to post their ads on legitimate activist pages. I wonder how much of that information has made it's way here?

The message she was imparting, in her biased expert opinion, was that this was all about sowing devision. The shitposters played the long game, starting first with bolstering pride and group identity, then eventually using that very identity as rationale for political action.

Spies and transparency

It's not hard to suspect that much of this is true. Before I joined Steem I had become really tired of all the shitposting on Facebook. The groups I was in were becoming more and more toxic. This was right around the time that DiResta alleges the steering really began to take off. I was part of several political groups, of all different kinds and sides, and it seemed to be devolving rapidly into adversarial chaos. It's funny not to think back that Steem seemed a lot friendlier in those days, and though there was a lot of arguing and discussion, I could tell it was largely "good faith".

Still, I joined here pseudononymously. I was tired of being tracked, being watched and mined for information. It angered me that my relevant personal details were observed, analysed, then bought and sold, all in order to manipulate me. I though, enough. So I came to Steem, with no ads, no need to use the preferred access portal, and with a lot of interesting folks. And of course the promise of internet money in the form of votes was a carrot worth trying to bite at the time.

I argued against the radical transparency that @dan wrote about, specifically because of the implications above, for the ease of mining and so on. Radical opacity seemed far wiser, so I practiced that, and continue to. But what I'm seeing more and more is that on public platforms transparency is important.

Privacy in the home, transparency in public

I think the infiltration problem is pretty huge. I actually came to know someone who claimed to semi-professionally infiltrate political organizations too, though I'll give nothing else away on that. It's seems so so easy with the current state of online discourse.

All this has left me wondering if the privacy focus isn't a little off in most people's conception, including my own. Privacy is important of course, but perhaps when we speak in public we should not expect the privacy we do in our own homes.

This leads us to question how public and private spaces can be defined online, and I think there is a lot of room for debate here. But the debate must be had.

And this leads me personally to question how tenable my pseudononymous status is here. Should I be more open, as say my friend @tarazkp has?