No, MI5 should not have more control over social media

Regardless of the pros and cons of letting the intelligence agencies have some kind of moderating role on social media, they take a lot of pretty weird positions (not helped that they were previously accused of distributing disinformation for the KGB [1]). Their thesis seems to be:

* the report doesn't provide enough evidence that there are any bots (despite both Twitter and Facebook claiming to have removed thousands of bot accounts)

* the report doesn't do enough to assert that any bots, if they exist, are Russian in origin (despite the known existence of e.g. the Internet Research Agency)

* if there were bots, they weren't effective at manipulating elections/referenda

> Because despite near-constant braying from some corners of public life, the idea that Russia sustains prolonged, successful disinformation operations with the power to swing elections rests on a shaky evidence base.

Part of the problem is that we don't (and arguably can't) know if they affected elections/referenda but we do know there's been attempts by Russian-backed criminals to access data owned by political campaigns in the US and France [2]. Were they doing that just for fun?

We do know that in, for example, the US elections, some counties/states swung for Trump in 2016 by pretty narrow margins. Were those affected more by "but her emails", some sort of disinformation campaign, or the general unpopularity of Clinton? Maybe all of the above but it's a stretch to dismiss it all.

> This was the Robert Mueller inquiry, which didn’t turn up any evidence that Russia colluded with Trump to influence the outcome of the election.

Well no, they didn't find evidence of direct collusion, but it also concluded that they'd have indicted Trump for conspiracy to obstruct justice if he weren't PotUS [3].

> There’s also the important point that the upcoming generation is far savvier at discerning ‘fake news’ or ‘disinformation’ than older generations. All of this begs the question, how much of a threat is so-called disinformation really?

We know that older generations are more inclined to turn out and vote [4], so where is this going? If upcoming generations are better able to distinguish 'fake news' then do we need to prevent the older people who aren't from voting?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Statesman#After_Kingsley_M...

2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39705062

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_Report#Episodes_of_all...

4: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/insights/general-electi...

I recall when GCHQ forced The Guardian to destroy hard drives containing materials leaked by Snowden: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-rele....

Giving intelligence agencies more power over the media and speech is an alarming idea.

"What evidence do you have that these accounts are Russian funded or controlled?" -> "That's classified for national security reasons."

"Have they published something which is actually false or misleading, or is it just something which the UK government finds inconvenient?" -> "No further questions at this time."

Let’s be frank about what’s really happening. The ruling progressive dogmas of the day are incredibly fragile to the spread of inconvenient facts. They require full spectrum domination of information channels in order to maintain their pre-eminence. Yahoo! for instance used to present neutral, matter-of-fact reporting that users could freely comment on. Then they removed the ability of users to control which news organisations showed up in their feed, filling up the home page with outrage rags such as HuffPost, DailyBeast and The Guardian. Then they removed the ability of users to see comments by other users. The narratives must not be challenged, and attention must not wander. Expect ever more restrictive policies towards what people can say and read online.

GCHQ apparently forced them to destroy several laptops using an angle grinder (video in the link) while agents watched. Really wouldn’t fancy breathing in all the dust/fumes created, likely full of heavy metals.