From Citizen Kane to X and Meta
Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ masterpiece is regularly cited as the greatest film ever made. The film and tv obsession with media moguls hasn’t really ceased, with Jesse Armstrong’s Succession series – loosely based on the Murdoch dynasty – being the latest huge success.
But the era of powerful press barons is over. The media moguls depicted as Charles Foster Kane or Logan Roy have a meaningless reach and influence next to the likes of Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The way we consume and distribute news and information is utterly transformed. Although it dropped in 2024 X has about 429 million users. Meta has 3.29 billion daily active users (DAUs) across its core products, including: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads. Our best fiction writers can’t keep up with the dystopian moment.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced his craven capitulation to Trump’s bullying, this has consequences for the quality of public discourse and interaction globally, and particular consequences for minorities. Facts are inconvenient, and have been labelled ‘woke’. Meta are effectively undoing its platforms’ content moderation regime to curb its own “censorship”. This is a pivotal moment where tech lords bend the knee to autocracy while our fiction writers play catch up analysing old media orders. This is a pivotal moment. Dia Kayyali from the Christchurch Call Advisory Network, a technology and human rights consultant, explains for Tech Policy Press:
“On Tuesday, Meta cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and newly-minted Chief Global Affairs Officer (and longtime conservative Republican operative) Joel Kaplan announced that Meta would be getting rid of its fact-checking program and pledged to work with President-elect Donald Trump to uphold free speech and fight “dangerous censorship” from platform regulation. Meta also published sweeping changes to its “Hateful Conduct” Community Standard. The policy, formerly known as the Hate Speech Community Standard, is now written to specifically allow more hateful content targeting transgender people, immigrants, and women–including cisgender women.”
“Every change Meta made on Tuesday, like everything it has ever done, was ultimately a business decision. But this may be its most cynical business move yet. The changes appear to cater specifically to the rise of far-right leaders and ideology globally, not just in the United States. Like Elon Musk’s transformation of X, the changes on Meta platforms will be noticeable, and they will be harmful not only to marginalized groups but also to public safety more broadly.”
Io Dodds reports for the Independent (‘Facebook lifts restrictions on calling women ‘property’ and transgender people ‘freaks’‘):
“Facebook and Instagram have quietly loosened their public rules on hate speech against transgender people, women, and immigrants as executives seek to curry favor with Donald Trump.
In an update to its hate speech policy on Tuesday, spotted first by The Independent, the apps’ parent company Meta deleted numerous clauses banning specific derogatory statements about protected groups, while adding detailed exceptions for anti-trans speech.
Gone is the clause saying you cannot compare women to “household objects or property.” Also removed is a prohibition on claiming that there is “no such thing” as a trans or gay person.”
Chris Stokel-Walker, author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App has written of the changes:
“Where Meta goes, the world – online and offline – follows. And Meta has just decided to take a drastic, dramatic handbrake turn to the right.”
Don’t believe me. Believe the watchdogs. “Meta’s announcement today is a retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation,” said the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent, self-appointed arbiter of Meta’s moves, in a statement.
“Why they say that is because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from being so polarised over the past decade or more by social media, it’s that those who are the angriest win arguments. Outrage and lies can spread on social media, and have only been kept partly in check by platforms’ ability to intervene when things get out of hand. (Remember just four years ago, Meta suspended Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram for two years for inciting the violence that racked the Capitol on 6 January 2021.)”
This is what capitulation looks like.
While the journalist Carole Cadwalladr has said: “What we did during the first wave of disruption, 2016-24, won’t work now. Can you “weaponise” social media when social media is the weapon? Remember the philosopher Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”? Well the medium now is Musk. The world’s richest man bought a global communication platform and is now the shadow head of state of what was the world’s greatest superpower. That’s the message. Have you got it yet?”
“Does the technology mudslide hypothesis now make sense? Of how a small innovation can eventually disrupt a legacy brand? That brand is truth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times.”
“You have a subscription? Enjoy your clean, hygienic, fact-checked news. Then come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes. Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. Our information system is London’s stinking streets before the Victorian miracle of sanitation.”
“Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news?”
She’s 100% right, but this world is completely normalised and the tech-lords are venerated and championed. Here’s Scotland’s favourite lobbying group tagging-in Elon Musk to an interview with the First Minister and Deputy FM:
“Would you work specifically with @elonmusk to make Scotland an attractive place for him to invest?”
Kate Forbes: “Right now it’s pretty erratic.”
John Swinney: “When it comes to economic development, we’ve got to proceed with care and caution.”@CalumAM | @akmaciver |… pic.twitter.com/Ez0wVZuv4D
— Holyrood Sources (@HolyroodSources) January 8, 2025
This is the wildly erratic Musk who has just made a point of abusing elected MPs and championing the German Afd, but it is unquestionably a good that our government “make Scotland an attractive place for him to invest?” What would Musk have to do in order to raise a critical question about engaging with him for these people?
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I mean, if Carole Cadwalladr actually said that the truth was lurking behind the New York Times paywall, then that sounds about as correct as sanitation being a Victorian miracle. Fact checker!? And isn’t the Thames filled with turds again? Perhaps we are living the modern equivalent of Roman plumbing:
Roman Empire’s use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jan/06/roman-empires-use-of-lead-lowered-iq-levels-across-europe-study-finds
History repeats on itself, innit?
I think the point she was making is that there’s a digital divide and as content gets put behind paywalls (as legacy media dies off and they have to make a buck elsewhere) that divide is exacerbated. I think she’s right.
@Editor, I get the impression from the quote that Carole Cadwalladr regards the New York Times and Victorian London (People of the Abyss) as healthy developments, whereas I regard these as part a much broader flow of eco-social maldevelopments. I mean, the New York Times has long been mocked by USAmerican counterculture, rocked by scandals and been subject to some pretty damning criticism about its news values and honesty. The Thames is an open sewer, the last I heard.
It strikes me as odd that Carole Cadwalladr, who writes for the Observer, which still publishes on the Guardian site without a paywall, would not qualify that remark (and perhaps did in a longer piece).
The financial problems of some newspapers are not necessarily connected with new media rivals. Presumably the Ferret is an example showing people will pay for investigative journalism? Maybe the kind of journalism (truth-seeking) missing from corporate news outlets for some well-established reasons?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
I’ve never seen the point of paying for content. The information is usually free elsewhere; and, if the content creator doesn’t want me to see the spin they put on that information, then why create the content in the first place.
The best way to pull down paywalls is to boycott the content behind them.
Free speech sounds good in principle but is a bit of a myth and will always have boundaries.
Free speech is easy and beneficial for rich and powerful as it leaves them free to say anything while being protected from fear of litigation.
It is more of a double edged sword for poorer people and minorities who are often subject to litigation by richer and powerful if they try to speak out.
Many people quite reasonably practise self censorship either out of respect for other’s feelings or to avoid antagonising others.
@John, in terms of political philosophically, the greater value is in good speech not free speech. Or:
“The task is not to come up with principles that always favors expression, but rather, to decide what is good speech and what is bad speech.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/archIves/sum2020/entries/freedom-speech/
Truly free speech tends towards cacophony (and shitposting, just to pre-empt Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist’s response).
One candidate template for good speech patterns is the Socratic Method, where the argumentation mode is consensual, moderate, progressive, typically non-academic, and non-onerous (while developing definitions of terms as required). There are potentially many others.
However, concentration on speech itself is an example of several biases, such as humanism, Will over Health, presentism, and ableism. The costs of speech are unequal. Often there will be greater value in saying little or nothing, or deferring one’s turn; but this rule is perhaps unlikely to be followed by those who enjoy privileged speech.
John Rawls: Theory of Justice
Jürgen Habermas: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns
See also the Habermas-Rawls debate (around the question of how to do political philosophy under conditions of cultural pluralism) that took place in The Journal of Philosophy throughout 1995, and the ‘surpassing’ of this debate in Nicholas Rescher’s Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus.
And cacophony (discord) is good: it’s from out of this cacophony that elenchus (Socratic dialogue) arises. The latter is premised on fundamental disagreement.
@Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist, you say as much about cacophony as saying leprosy is good, because it can be cured with antibiotics. What are your stone tablets? What is your Church? You big up Christian theology, but run and hide in the cracks because (unlike Socratic dialogues) you fear to put one consistent name to your views. Why is that?
I’ve explained my nomenclature here hunners o times.
And you’d better watch! Article 2 of Mike’s Comments Policy states that ‘…ad hominem attacks and personal abuse won’t be tolerated. If you don’t like an article that’s fine – but try and address the authors ideas – not the person.’ (Not that it bothers me; as I’ve explained before, commenting pseudonymously leaves me immune to such abuse.)
This is is the old fashioned enlightenment ideal of free speech: the idea being that the truth naturally emerges from competing voices in a marketplace of ideas. If that were true then it would be counterproductive to exclude any particular opinion. But it’s obviously not true.
@Niemand, I think there were a variety of so-called Enlightenment views on speech, but I accept your point.
In the contrasting classical Socratic dialogues, for example, named individuals with often recognised lived experiences are obliged to admit when they are wrong, for example (not a feature of Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist on these pages). When you get bad-faith actors presenting and re-presenting debunked views, you get zombie arguments swelling the cacophony and degrading the quality of speech. The good idea, of course, is to listen more than one speaks. So perhaps good listening is much more important than free speech to the quality of dialogue. Certainly, good listening was what we practiced in philosophy tutorials, partly to learn from others, partly in order to ask better questions when it came our opportunity (and learn from others).
We were trained in philosophy as a living discipline, not primarily as a endless regurgitation of the writings of privileged white European men often from slaveholding patriarchies, which distinction I am very much keen to emphasise lest my vocation be fraudulently misrepresented (or to take the kinder imaginative interpretation, someone self-taught in philosophical areas may easily fall into that error). What the discipline of philosophy can actively contribute is to expose bad arguments (fallacies and sophistries, innocent mistakes as well as fraud), which is complementary to but distinct from fact-checking (and we will see how this trend towards removing fact-checking will boost cacophony on social media). And of course, present examples of good arguments, valid reasoning, better questions…
Socratic dialogue isn’t a method through which ‘the truth naturally emerges from competing voices in a marketplace of ideas’; it’s a method a method of discussion that uses a series of questions and answers to reach a consensus or ‘general will’ on a topic. Indeed, a key feature of Socratic dialogue is that it starting with a universal question that doesn’t have a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer that could constitute the ‘truth’ of the matter. Another is that it appeals to first-person (subjective) experience rather than third-person (objective) truth; its method is ‘hermeneutic’ rather than ‘scientific’, in other words.
Socratic dialogue is used in a variety of (non-truth finding), including:
a) Philosophy, where the goal is to sharpen one’s moral and ethical compass, in contrast to science, where the goal is to decipher ‘the truth’.
b) Education, where it’s used to increase students’ critical thinking abilities, i.e. to question concepts, develop questions, and reach a consensus or ‘general will’ on an issue.
c) Therapy, where it’s used to help us explore how we come to have the thoughts that we do and evaluate the accuracy and helpfulness of our thoughts.
Socratic dialogue was largely rediscovered by romanticism as an antidote to the enlightenment ideal of ‘free speech’, in which ‘the truth’ was thought to emerge naturally from competition in a marketplace of ideas. Indeed, it opposed the very idea that truth is natural with the notion that truth is a human construct, something we make rather than discover.
I very much like the description of ‘bad-faith actors presenting and re-presenting debunked views, you get zombie arguments swelling the cacophony and degrading the quality of speech’. It is an excellent way of describing what is happening with current discourse, with people like Musk heading the cacophony. There is no universal ‘freedom’ in such free speech. Quite the opposite.
If I am honest I care little for technical arguments between philosophers but my assessment of what number man is arguing is that it is does not map to the real world we are living in right now where those with the most power and money and loudest voices get the attention, and by and large they talk endless lying shite for political ends. Further abstruse arguments about the difference between a market place of ideas and Socratic dialogue are irrelevant as we live in a society where this Socratic ideal is impossible whilst the market place of ideas leads to gross perpetuation of falsehoods that are truly damaging to it.
We need less cacophony, not more. The more have the worse things will get. As I have said before, the cacophony leadsulitmatley only one way -hate, fascism and war.
‘…those with the most power and money and loudest voices get the attention, and by and large they talk endless lying shite for political ends.’
Yes; and this was precisely what Socrates was seeking to counter in his day by ‘corrupting the youth’ with his dialectical method. Perhaps, if we used Socratic dialogue more intensively in our classrooms and youth centres, to strengthen young people’s critical abilities, having the loudest voice might not matter so much, those with the most money and power might not thereby have most influence, and populist demagogues might not get away with their demagoguery.
The Socratic ideal (based on the idea that humans have innate knowledge that can be rediscovered through learning) is indeed a nonsense. The Socratic method, on the other hand, is a dialogue between participants that uses questioning to explore the underlying beliefs that shape the their own judgements and those of their interlocutors, with a view to agreeing common ground or ‘consensus’ (which takes the place of some [unobtainable] ‘fixed’ and objective truth).
I don’t see why this method is impossible or irrelevant.
I agree it is not irrelevant but the problem is that we are no longer at the stage where ‘a dialogue between participants that uses questioning to explore the underlying beliefs’ is possible. We seem to have de-evolved. This is because of SD’s ‘zombie arguments’, the bad faith, the deliberate perpetuation of falsehoods, amplified to the point where they are believed by a significant proportion of society. Falsehoods can be debunked but it does not matter if the ‘participant’ who put them forward (and their followers) carry on using them as the basis of their arguments and beliefs because, by default, they refuse to accept the veracity messenger of the debunking (it is all MSM lies!). This is what the cacophony is doing right now.
So this is not a question of principle but a serious practical problem of the way instantaneous global information dissemination and discussion in the global village of gossip has made the false equal to the truth, or at least, the truer picture.
And it is not a case of a simple fact being true or not, but an accumulation of them, distortions of them and a deliberate blindness to anything that might contradict them. The Musk / Reform / Tory ‘discovery’ of the grooming gang scandal is a classic example, and my normally sensible, kind and caring friend who believes they have uncovered and exposed that scandal, an example of the corruption that ensues.
I do not think this phenomenon is ultimately about political hue though as there are also examples one could cite promulgated by progressives.
We have to keep on challenging but we also have to recognise the goalposts have been moved.
It is inevitable that the powerhungry will collapse..given enough time and if we all do not listen to them do not go to their level or to their online place..make it a nogo zone .keep to your own hearts counsel..
Keep asking the [mis]informant to provide evidence in justification of their claim. If they can’t, ignore the claim. If they can, test that evidence. Is it itself in fact sound? Is it in fact sufficient to justify the claim being made?
Maintain this scepticism always; take no claim on trust. Critical thinking: that’s the best defence against mis/disinformation.
I keep thinking of the following quote from Bertrand Russell when listening to Trump, Musk, Farage etc
‘The fundamental cause of trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.’
lol, I’d like to see any of these dweebs call any of the lassies I kain an object, they’ve get a skelp roun the kisser cov