The internet is being policed by a series of rubes

Here’s the bad news: We can’t trust Silicon Valley to police itself. That has become abundantly clear from the many scandals involving Russian disinformation campaigns, Cambridge Analytica, Twitter bots, secret data breaches, Google geo-tracking and the like.

Here’s the other bad news: We can’t trust Washington politicians to police it, either.

The expansive Luddite Caucus has no idea how 21st-century technology actually works, nor any apparent motivation to learn.

President Trump and other Republicans have lately complained that tech companies are allegedly muzzling, purging or “shadow-banning” conservative voices. Most recently, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, aspiring speaker of the House, tweeted on Friday: “Another day, another example of conservatives being censored on social media.” He added the hashtag “#StopTheBias” and called for Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to “explain to Congress what is going on.”

The cause of McCarthy’s complaint?

He was annoyed that a tweet by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, retweeting a Drudge Report missive, wasn’t immediately visible to him because Twitter said it contained “potentially sensitive content.” As a Twitter executive pointed out, this was due to two factors: The Drudge Report has flagged its own tweets as “potentially sensitive”; and McCarthy had set his Twitter account preferences to hide any tweets flagged this way.

In other words, McCarthy was censoring his own Twitter feed, something he could easily reverse by changing his account settings. Confronting face-palming mockery, McCarthy nonetheless doubled down, still claiming political persecution.

This is hardly the only time that politicians have flaunted their digital illiteracy.

We’re now a dozen years past the infamous “series of tubes” speech. Yet our political leaders still don’t seem to have learned much about those “tubes” or the cyber-sewage that frequently flows through them.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/rampell-the-internet-is-being-policed-by-a-series-of-rubes/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=edee5635db-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-edee5635db-228635337