TANNER MIRRLEES: Okay, well Hello everybody, welcome to day three of the
Communication and Cultural Policy in the Age of the Platform conference.
My name is Tanner Mirrlees, and I'm happy to be the chair of this panel, Platforms, Power and Populism.
The panel showcases some new and emerging research on these topics by Alex Dean Cybulski, Nick Dyer-Witheford,
Alessandra Mularoni, Andrey Miroshnichenko, Zeinab Farokhi, Rianka Singh, and myself.
Our panel will run for 90 minutes and each presentation will be no longer than about 12 minutes,
so I'll let each presenter know when you have about one minute remaining to conclude.
Following these six presentations, we'll have about 15 minutes for Q&A with the audience.
And some discussion. So, okay, without further ado let's get things going with our first presentation by Alex Dean Cybulski, welcome Alex.
ALEX DEAN CYBULSKI: Hey, thank you it's really nice to be on a panel with one of my former colleagues, Rianka, so hey Riankia how's it going,
ALEX DEAN CYBULSKI: So today I'm going to be talking about the National Security Agency's Open Source hacking tool, Ghidra,
and a recent policy shift at the NSA towards what is referred to as they're persistent engagement strategy.
And to talk about some of that and talk about what it means i'm going to provide a bit of a political economy of the Labor of hacking.
So originally I wanted to sort of issue, all these provocative statements about some of the things I was going to talk about today.
That you see on the left-hand side, that the NSA is working on a PR campaign to fix this relationship with the tech Community post-Snowden.
That the NSA makes security software that runs on all android phones, etc, etc, but I actually prefer the format of the
Vince McMahon GIF as sort of just doing that work for me so that I can talk about some of the more specific details of these programs .
So since 2018, the NSA the National Security Agency of the United States has run what it's called it's persistent engagement strategy,
which is a program which unclassifies and discloses the offensive capabilities of its cyber espionage adversaries.
And, as well as cyber criminals and releases this information to public security platforms. And this effectively
burns the ability of these organizations in some cases to cause harm with specific forms of malware,
and it leverages the NSAs, sort of, asymmetrical visibility into client networks, including government agencies and critical infrastructure.
And the NSA's defensive mission has been sort of a long standing part of the organization's history and the
NSA has been highly influential in the US software
security policy space, and in government technology. These projects have included things like the Orange Book Program,
SE Linux, and many, many other projects. And in fact the SE Linux is sort of an access control module for Linux that he has
actually been integrated into android phones.
So anyone who owns an android phone right now you're running NSA technology on that phone as a 2012.
And more recently in 2019,
the NSA released an open-source reverse engineering tool called Ghidra and it's seen rapid and widespread adoption in the
hacker community since its release in 2019.
Ghidra in this persistent engagement strategy, I think are our reflection of the NSAs literacy with hacker culture and the technology industry.
It reflects an emerging appreciation of hacker modes of production around the production, distribution and consumption of hacker knowledge.
It also represents sort of a counter-intuitive appreciation of our traditional understanding of hackers
as sort of anti-establishment, anti-surveillance, anarchists, cyber criminals and whistleblowers.
And, in fact, this represents a larger strategy by many of the 5eyes intelligence agencies, that many of the countries that comprise
the 5eyes intelligence agencies, who are all currently in the process of sharing and disclosing their own Open Source projects
And, you know, the NSA to a certain extent, I think, has demonstrated a lot of savvy and a lot of cultural understanding of hacker culture.
If you look to the right, this is an NSA phone charging booth that the NSA regularly turns out at hacker conferences and, you know,
The slogan being: You know you want to try it!
Because no hacker in their right - self-respecting hacker - in the right mind would of course hook their phone up
to something that belongs to the NSA.
And so to talk about this, I really wanted, what I want to start with, is this concept from Julie Cohen's work.
Where she coined the term, the Bio Political Public Domain, and she uses this term
ALEX DEAN CYBULSKI: To describe the way in which private corporations have sort of hijacked public data and enclose generated through the circulation populations.
I would argue that the NSAs programs are an expression of a similar concept. That the NSAs programs are an expression of it's hegemony
over the information security, public domain
by leveraging its visibility into networks, and its military-industrial funding, if cyber espionage and surveillance,
to adopt a complimentary political economy to the technology industry.
And by creating and distributing an open source hacking tool, the NSA reflects a shared intellectual economy with hacker culture.
You know Ghidra, this program, is extensive in modular. So any improvements and plugins for its open source software can be
used either in defensive, and in offensive intelligence operations by the NSA.
By open sourcing Ghidra, the US leverages high levels of technical literacy and its dominance of the information security sector
to effectively strengthen its own hand.
And so, while it might seem sort of counterintuitive to assume that attracting hackers and having an open, sort of,
intelligence tool, may be sort of counterintuitive, I would argue that this policy in this platform drawn the rhetoric of openness
but inherently rely on asymmetries in the accumulation of funding and expertise which allows the US to maintain economic
and strategic hegemony in cyberspace.
So just quickly to tell you where this data came from, that I'm, sort of, bringing out as part of my study here
I observed three hacker competitions in the US and Canada in 2019, and I interviewed 55 members of
the hacking community who participate in these competitions,
producing about 90 hours of research. And while the interview specifically focused on the Labor of hacking,
and the communities, and tools which contribute to hacker culture, specifically those pretending to security,
the NSA and Ghidra were not topics of my questions from the outset,
but rather they emerged as sort of themes when I began to do data analysis and I began to see these things come up and up again in
my research.
And as well, I did some archival research into the software releases and policies of the NSA.
So, just quickly to go over the hacker, sort of, mode of production and how it's been represented in the literature,
I think Gabriella Coleman and Alexander Golub sort of hit over the head when they said that
the hacker mode of production is an expression of liberal values around productive freedom.
And, what we see is a lot of contrasting positions on what the values of hackers are otherwise.
You know, famously levy has made a point of the hacker ethos, but I think more recently Christina Dunbar-Hester's work in
hacking diversity has really pointed out that there is a pretty significant political rift in
the hacker community as it pertains to ideology and identity.
And with regards to the production of free and open source software, (inaudible) wealth of networks of course
has popularized the idea that
the production of free and open-source software is somehow revolutionary, but I think Nathan Schneider's more recent work
has sort of called into question how hierarchical and how centrally managed these programs are.
So what is Ghidra? Ghidra is a software reverse engineering tool used for binary analysis.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about reverse engineering, but what this tool can be used for is
vulnerability discovery, software patching, malware analysis, and ultimately what's called software exploitation.
It supports Windows and Mac, it's distributed open-source on a GNU GPL license,
it's very collaborative, and has sort of like a Google docs-like functionality. It supports new
and emerging computing architectures - including ARM and IOT devices. It's lightweight and easy to automate.
It was internally developed and began its development in 1999 and has been used since then.
And it was announced on March 5 2019 by Rob Joyce, the senior advisor to the NSA, that it would be released open-source to the hacker community.
So, what is reverse engineering? Well reverse engineering is a process in which a hacker basically takes up,
well first off, to start, actually - probably the best way to explain it is this:
Programs are coded in a high level language which humans understand, but it needs to be reduced to what's called
low level assembly or machine code - a series of instructions,
and calculations performed by that computers processor. When a program is finished it's compiled into an executable program called a binary.
During reverse engineering, the hacker decompiles this binary so the instructions can be extracted.
Most binaries disassemble into assembly code - not the original high-level language. So reverse engineering requires
an understanding of high-level and low-level code to perform what's called static analysis.
Essentially, this process is very knowledge-intensive, it requires extensive knowledge of how these processors operate
and how the software that it was originally coded in works.
And reverse engineering is used to identify unanticipated or undocumented functionality and software
that can be used to undermine its confidentiality and integrity - the foundations of information security - to find what's called a vulnerability.
Traditionally, reverse engineering software has been incredibly expensive, and this is very different from the norm
for the hacker community, in which most software for computer
for performing hacking, the work of analyzing programs and finding vulnerabilities is traditionally been given away for free
because there's been no market for it.
But reverse engineering tools are sort of the exception to the rule.
IDA Pro, the industry standard reverse engineering tool, the license fee cost roughly about $6,000.
And so binary analysis is one of those few fields where the work is very lucrative,
but it's also very difficult and very nuanced. So traditionally, this is a very high-wage sort of field within Silicon Valley,
but also within other forms of within other industries.
So, enter the NSA. The NSA released a free reverse engineering tool that therefore requires,
that removes this massive economic barrier to access.
And information security scholarship and work is sort of in the midst of a small crisis, right now,
where it's very easy to teach these low-level skills, but it's much harder to teach these high-level reverse engineering skills,
And the cost of these tools is a contributing factor. So Ghidra addresses these issues around distribution of tools,
and having more users contribute to the development of the platform increases the potential applications,
and cybersecurity expertise of the US has available to call on. In fact Rob Joyce and his announcement of Ghidra, sort of,
announced that this is what -
This was an ideal recruitment tool for the NSA. To have people train on the software that it already uses in the workplace.
I was going to it's going to talk a little bit about what you can use binary analysis for but I'm going to skip over that
because i'm going to have to go into a conclusion with the minute I have left.
And ultimately here, what I want to kind of conclude on is this: The persistent engagement strategy offers us
a glimpse of the work of government surveillance and signal intelligence that has some clear social benefit.
I think we all agree that we would want the government to protect against attacks against critical infrastructure and our personal information.
And Ghidra has the nice benefit of solving economic barriers to work and education.
It also proves that governments can produce good software, which is something the neo-liberal and conservative consensus
about the work of government has traditionally denied it the ability to do.
And also that got these, you know, government software, can be a platform for continuous development.
And, you know, it's worth pointing out that the NSA is used Ghidra for 20 years, how many of us
can say the same thing about any piece of software that we've used, that we've continued to use it for 20 years?
But ultimately these programs are inextricable from the totality of the NSAs overarching goal
of maintaining US global and economic strategic hegemony.
They're subsidized by massive government spending funneled into the military-industrial complex
and intelligence work, and I think it's worth asking:
What kind of software could be produced in other - in socially advantageous areas that aren't
he military-industrial complex, given comparable investment.
So that's my talk, thank you for your patience.
TANNER MIRRLEES: Thanks so much Alexander, super interesting.
ALEX DEAN CYBULSKI: It's just Alex.
TANNER: Oh, sorry. ALEX DEAN CYBULSKI: Not Alexander, sorry.
TANNER: Oh yeah, it says Alexander on the screen, Alex, thank you.
Next up, we have Nick Dyer-Witheford on
Big Tech and Anti-trust Left Dilemmas. So, welcome Nick.
NICK DYER-WITHEFORD: Thank you.
Great. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I and my co-author Alessandra Mularoni,
thank the organizers, the participants, and the audience of this conference for the opportunity to present
our work. And I acknowledge that I'm speaking for them from the traditional lands of the Anishinnabe, Haudenosaunee, (inaudible), and the (inaudible).
Whose rights and roles as the vendors of the land and water we respect.
To begin,
It's anti-trust season for U.S. big tech.
After decades of public acquiescence to the self-aggrandizement of gigantic digital corporations,
and accumulation of political scandals, privacy concerns, commercial complaints, and insider
revelations have ignited a sudden outbreak of judicial and legislative initiatives to curtail or break up that power.
These initiatives include the fall 2020 U.S. House of Representatives inquiry and report on market abuses by
Alphabet, Apple Facebook and Amazon.
From Attorney General William Bars, Department of Justice prosecution of Google for anti-competitive practices,
and the US Federal Trade commission's case to divest Facebook of instagram and whatsapp.
Other investigations are underway into Apple and Amazon with other prosecutions possible,
and this is not to mention international regulator removes some quite bold from the EU, UK India, Australia and elsewhere.
Focusing on developments within the US, this paper maps for complex, contradictory politics of the anti-trust surge,
and seeks to explain why it presents both opportunities and dilemmas for the US Left, posing conundrums not just about
antitrust issues, but also about how to go beyond such issues to deeper revisions of network governance.
To illustrate these points got a couple of slides.
So our first slide shows five major positions in the anti trust spectrum.
The first, of course, is that of the corporate oligopolists, who CEOs and innumerable lobbyists and many media advocates
constantly remind anti-trust reformers that consumers benefit from their free of cheap services
That their platforms provide their contributions to national security, especially against China and their capacity to
sustain essential services in pandemic conditions.
These Oligopolists have historically been protected by second group "Light-Tough" Regulators,
coached in the Chicago School Consumer Welfare Doctrine.
This sees antitrust legislation, not as a prescription against market power, but nearly as a price control mechanism.
And this doctrine has inhibited even ostensibly progressive governments, such as that Obama,
which, despite it's support of net neutrality, in fact, shaped big tech oligopoly
by minimal anti trust enforcement and a revolving door of state Silicon Valley appointments.
That not only Biden, but many members of his administration come from this background,
as very serious doubts as to how far current anti trust enthusiasm will actually go.
Surprisingly central to revive anti-trust sentiment are right-wing populists, including republican legislators figures such as Josh Hawley,
whose book, The Tyranny of Big Tech, just came out a couple of days ago. Figures who are pro business, but critical of big tech,
either because they share Adam Smith's distasteful monopoly, or because they have moral concerns around privacy, speech freedoms, or screen addiction.
Their positions shade almost imperceptibly into that of former President Trump and his base, who incessantly bemoan the alleged liberal bias
of Silicon Valley titans. Apoplectic at the banning or shadow banning of right-wing hate speech from social media
and wish to eliminate section 230 of the communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from prosecution as content publishers.
There are thus unexpected lines of alliance from this group to the Neo-Brandeisians, sometimes unkindly referred to as hipster anti trust.
This group include legislators legislators, such as Elizabeth Warren Amy Klubochar, David Cicilline, and also scholars and
lawyers like Lisa Kahn and Tim Wu.
It updates the position of justice, Louis Brandeis, the pioneer of US anti-monopoly regulation,
re-articulating the goals of anti-trust policy in terms, not just the price, but also of power.
Insisting that consumer welfare extends to issues of democracy and privacy.
The Neo-Brandeisians revival of the US trust busting tradition is the cutting edge of of current anti trust politics.
But it's important to note that this is not in any sense anti-capitalist, it rather aims to create a more robust
market, limiting concentration of ownership in order to fend off more radical solutions.
Amongst these more radical solutions are some advocated by what we have turned Democratic Eco-Socialist,
most publicly recognized voices of whom
of those are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. They are simply the most legitimated and indeed
often, the most moderate spokespeople for a range of social movements that seek to place
digital capital under public or communal ownership.
And to make it accountable for Labor conditions, wealth redistribution, post colonial justice, and ecological sustainability.
This Demo Eco-Socialist grouping may ally with neo Brandeisians to diminish the most gargantuan capitalist power complexes.
But it is also often critical of anti trust solutions that retain a corporate managerial logic.
Instead, it wants to go beyond anti-trust to decommodified networks in favor of what Michael Kwet terms
an International Digital Tech New Deal.
There are, however, several options for such routes beyond anti-trust, not all of which may be compatible with each other.
Now second slide, shows for such paths.
So for public utilities, this is the most prominent left alternative to to anti trust.
Instead of breaking up big tech it accepts that network effects do tend to create natural monopolies,
but wants to place these intrinsically big enterprises under public control as utilities like electricity, water, sewage, etc.
Now digital utilities may be conceived, either as closely regulated private companies,
or, as government-run organizations, administered at municipal, regional or national levels and there's
often some slippage between these two meanings but the common feature
is on a greater role for a democratized state in network governance. The current high profile issue on
this ticket is publicly funded high speed broadband.
But other proposals have included a US public cloud computing platform and even social media
positioned as platform utilities, funded by government but operated by independent statutory organizations.
A second strand of politics beyond anti-trust is, of course, to organize digital Labor.
A major democratic socialist focus is platform unionization and regulation to protect workers wages
conditions and rights, and of gig economy conditions characteristic of big tech.
This strategy has recently seen both advances, such as the formation of the alphabet Workers Union, but also defeats, such as Uber's
successful Uber's proposition 22 in California and Amazon's successful anti-union drive in Alabama.
A third strand is platform co-ops, and I'm sure everyone is aware, since the term 'platform cooperativism'
was coined by Trevor Scholz in 2014, the movement to develop social ownership of platforms by workers
and sometimes users has attracted wide attention.
- create space for smaller platform called experiments, but the political significance of worker-owned enterprises
within a market context, is hotly debated.
And a fourth possible step beyond anti-trust is creation of what I've terms as the (re)Decentralized Network.
Now this option rejects the "Facebook to Statebook" tone of public utility options.
It rather champions, a return to a more decentralized Internet --- peer to peer networks encryption,
open-source software and interoperable protocols, but freed from dependence on algorithmic advertising by multi level government funding.
And for an outstanding Canadian articulation of this option I refer you to Derek Hyrnyshyn's
recent essay in Socialist Register 2021, I think I saw Derek in the audience here it's great if you are here Derek.
So to conclude, the current anti-trust coalition is one of strange bedfellows, whether it can succeed to any-
-to any degree is uncertain, but recent Neo-Brandeisian Biden policy appointments such as those
of Tim Wu and Lisa Kahn suggest, perhaps a more vigorous regulatory agenda than many other anticipated.
So too does the inclusion of some public options in the high speed internet provisions of the infrastructure bill.
But the contradictory bipartisanship of the anti-trust surge of anti-trust forces may result
in chimerical outcomes, including problematic Internet speech regulations.
Nevertheless, by challenging elements of neo-liberal common sense, about digital networks, the anti-trust
search has open space for more radical possibilities. These options are variously compatible
or contradictory to each other, the question remains:
Is it possible to formulate a coherent collectivist vision for the networks beyond anti-trust and beyond the capital?
Thank you.
TANNER MIRRLEES: Thanks so much Nick. Okay well next up, we have
TANNER: Zeinab Farokhi, who will be speaking to Islamophobiazisation of a nation
and the nexus between news channels and Twitter in India. Welcome Zeinab.
ZEINAB FAROKHI: Thank you, Tanner. Thanks to the organizers for
putting this panel together, it's a pleasure to be here.
So in India, anti-Muslim prejudice has as part dramatically ever since BJP, the most prominent Hindu
Nationalist Right-Wing party came to power, with the majority in the 2014 general election.
So BJP propagation of Hindu nationalism, the belief that India is a Hindu nation and belongs to Hindu first
has fostered hatred and demonization of Muslim.
So in fact, Muslim demonization amplification or at the heart of this Hindu nationalist movement, where the depiction
of wisdom, as the "skippers-orders" created the very possibility of upholding Hindu identity and Hindu civilization.
So, since BJP came into power, fake information conspiracies about Muslims have been disseminated through both social media
and and ministry media.
resulting in a craving for war between a Muslim and Hindu. My presentation address one of the widespread
conspiracies about Muslims on social media called the Love Jihad campaign.
So Love Jihad is a campaign started by right-wing Hindu nationalists in 2009, alleging that Muslim men fake love to
lure on Muslim women and marry them in order to convert them to Islam.
The exponents of this conspiracy has said that innocent Hindu woman are converted to Islam in order to increase the Muslim population.
And thereby waging war or Holy War against Hindus. So by evoking demographic fear and anxiety, this campaign
demonizes Muslims, and votes to advance the patriarchal idea of saving Hindu girls from an imagined Muslim truth.
So drawing on the case of Love Jihad,
I show how through writing, and English menacing news channels, namely Republic TV and Time has now, have employed
Twitter to amplify effective propaganda perpetuating fear and anxiety about Muslims, thereby polarizing
Hindus and Muslims and mobilizing Hindu voters to bring a Hindu party to power.
They use Twitter to manipulate and manufacture public opinion against Muslim communities to further the Hindu political agenda.
Undoubtedly, Twitter has been crucial in constructing the frame of Love Jihad, bringing this issue to the global level, allowing
supporters who endorse the campaign to be alliance and create transnational sound for the Community.
I draw on the concenpt of Digital Governmentality, which functions, based on the three regimes of government that
govern the user behavior, namely incentive, design and frame.
So, the incentive regime of Governmentality encourages certain outcomes through guidance, then caution.
I draw on the incentive regime of Digital Governmentality to explain how most news channels use
Twitter to orchestrate, direct and manipulate (inaudible) individual in affective ways.
World interactive nature of social media allows participants to express their ideals and opinions, and
discourse on Muslim was always Hindu,
is directly or indirectly engineered to affect the incentive by this channel. So incentive refers to different tactics used by individuals,
and/or institution, to motivate others, to act in a certain way, without deploying any course of tactic,
so in this way freedom itself functions as a form of exercising power to use for core ideals.
And in the case of Love Jihad, the two news channels that I mentioned use numerous incentivist strategies
to generate provocative content.
The channels use a tacky-like repetition, and question format/headline, hashtag, sensational probes, among others,
to enhance the degree of popularity and the (inaudible) of their message about Love Jihad.
Using this incentive not only then established the Love Jihad conspiracy as the truth, but also provoked individuals to contribute to
the so called truth.
So I will show you how these incentives are used in the Love Jihad conspiracy.
The first Estrada rhetorical trick was repetition. Boost channels, harness the power of repetition by constantly tweeting
and the world 'Love Jihad' along with some negative and/or leading words, such as 'forced conversion', 'reality', etc.
For instance, bold font Love Jihad, along with the word reality, as in various tweets are repeated frequently on both channels.
It is important to emphasize that the more such rhetoric is repeated the more familiar becomes and the more familiar it becomes,
the more believable it becomes.
So, the second is strategy is Question Headlines. Question headlines are deployed alongside other (inaudible).
Research shows that question headlines instantly capture
the attention of readers, and increase the degree of (inaudible) of a message which then increase the degree of exposure
in the context of Love Jihad.
But asking leading questions such as: "Can 'Love Jihad' still be denied?" and "Is 'Love Jihad' a reality?"
audiences are more likely to conclude that Love Jihad is not only real but also undeniable.
So another function of the question headline is that it pre determines the conversation in response, for example,
users reply to the leading questions such as -
- that I put in the previous one - "Can Love Jihad still be denied?" or "Is Love Jihad reality?" says yes, if you're
blind, you know, it's still happening, it's the reality which again,
sort of repeating what the question was actually trying to imply. So what is evident here is that in this response
users active request can be seen.
The question led users to further reproduce a negative image of Muslims, as well as discursively
tie most of them to all the political issues.
Then other - the third rhetorical trick is Use of Hashtags. So boost channel, pursue audiences to use hashtags such as
#HinduGirlsHunted, #HInduGirlsforISIS,
#LoveJihad, name in their messages. Persuading audiences to use hashtags in their messages may give a false
impression to viewers to see these media thought processes as the own.
Posts and pretending to hashtag on Love Jiad suggested that the majority of their replies not only condemned the
Channels perspective on Love Jihad, but, more importantly, repeat the same words.
And phrases used in tweets along with those hashtags. Also by encouraging audiences to use predetermined hashtags,
the Channel strategy pre-establishes conversation tones and topics among users and potentially exposes them to other
like-minded people for future conversations.
The fourth rhetorical trick is Deployment of Sensational Probes.
So tweets such as lured, converted, packed off to Syria, Love Jihad is a dimension of tourism.
Or Love Jihad is a way for the extremists to pray upon women.
As you see in this example, sensational probes attach to Islam by (inaudible) referring to war, such as The Seafood Hunt
(inaudible),
are used as an effective rhetorical strategy to plan disinformation and hatred.
For instance, placing the word extremism, terorrism, along with the bold type Love Jihad in this way,
not only attacks Muslims with extremism and terrorism, but also serves to fuel anti-Muslim sentiment,
which empowers Hindu far left groups to paint Muslims as Dangerous Others.
ZEINAB FAROKHI: So, as you see here,
and in this case, digital media, politics, and affects are sort of intersected to showcase the Muslim community in negative light.
In conclusion, what is clear here is that Twitter is exploited by two Indian Right-Wing and English news channels to further
the polarization within Hindu and Muslim for political purposes.
To produce and defuse disnformation about Muslims and to provoke non-Muslims to circulate anti-Muslim rhetorics themselves.
The case study of Love Jihad is a good example of how propaganda and nationality have, through digital media,
came into a new digital discursive configuration, putting some feelings, such as fear and hatred in motion.
My study of these channels suggest that the prevalence of anti-Islam/anti-Muslim
rhetoric on Twitter may mask as a public opinion when, in fact, is said and diffused by gatekeeperd such as news media channels,
who have more power over such spaces and have knowledge and information, that is more lucky to to be disseminated among larger audiences.
Thank you.
TANNER MIRRLEES: Thank you Zeinab, fascinating.
TANNER: Okay, so, I guess I'm up next.
Recently, over the past seven years or so I've been looking at the rise of right-wing nationalism and white nationalist movements,
particularly encompassed by the euphamism alt-right around the world.
And I'm more recently also looking at the GAFAM and the way that it's been responding to the alt-right in conjunction
with anti-fascist activists and activist practices so
My paper kind of bundles all this together, but then tries to speak to the theme of today's
conference as well, so it's called 'The GAFAMs Privatized Hate Speech governance, The Case of the Alt-Right in Canada.'
So I'm going to talk a bit about the alt-right, I'll then talk a bit about the GAFAM, and then I'll sort of put it in the Canadian
communication and cultural policy framework to wrap up. So what is the alt-right?
Well, from the 2016 election campaign of Donald Trump, to the present day, the alt-right has become a populace for U.S and global politics.
The alt-right is largely a euphemism for an authoritarian populace, white nationalist, or white supremacist movement
that rejects the Republican and Democratic party's neo-conservative and neo liberal consensus,
and hates the left especially, as all fascist historically have.
More and more today, the alt-right or the white nationalist will sort of bemoan the power of cultural Marxists and
especially sort of the new resurging Democratic socialist movements in the United States and around the world.
So what does sort of the alt-right think? What's their epistemology? What's their philosophy? What's their political ideology? Well,
folks on the alt-right call themselves 'race realists', and they take race to be the most essential and most important component of a groups identity.
They take a page from the biological racial nationalist discourses of the 19th-century bourgeois euro colonial empires,
and they sort of re-vivify this, seeing the planet is naturally divided between different races of people.
Guided by the notion that each race of people should have its own sovereign state - again kind of like bourgeious nationalism in the 19th century -
the alt-rights end game today in the 21st century is the formation of white territorial race states, separate from groups of people
racialized as non white.
So committed to the craft of race-making, of making an essential ontological white race,
alt-right propaganda pits a supposedly virtuous race of white people against an evil global and national power elite that
threatens so called white racial identity with genocide or extinction,
when it advances policies of immigration, hybridity, and multiculturalism. And so this is a
typical populace rhetoric, you know, a good people versus a bad elite.
And the sort of role of the vanguard alt-right proponents and propagandists is to organize those good people to
overthrow the elite, and then make sort of a new society in their racist image.
So very much a right-wing populism is distinct from forms of left-wing populism today.
So the alt-right declares the need to reproduce white identity. Again this construction of white identity in a world of
many competing and clashing racial identities,
sometimes even going so far to say they're doing identity politics for white people, which is a complete obscuration, of course, of the
real history of identity politics in the United States and elsewhere.
They're apples and oranges, in the way they're being used here, but nonetheless they use that term.
The alt-right folks see themselves as the vanguard of a struggle to protect and promote the fiction of a white race
against the supposed threat to that racialized identity by people who have been racialized as non white.
So the alt-right is behind all kinds of hate crimes and hate propaganda, targeting Jews, Muslims, and other racialized people and
you've seen sort of, again, in tandem with the Trump presidency, you know, this astronomical rise of hate crimes in the United States and elsewhere.
The alt-right nonetheless does not have one big political party, even though we assume an affinity directly between Trump and the alt-right,
but instead, sort of, fights for its cause with a network of different groups, not all that sort of align or sort of think or act in the same
way, there's debates in the alt-right - in the far right - just as there is in the far left,
about strategy and tactics, but nonetheless the alt right uses violence and persuasion, a combination of force and consent to achieve tactical goals.
As related to a larger strategy of taking state power through Republican Party entrism, or, alternatively, through fomenting a violent insurrection or revolutionary race war.
So those are basically the ways that they're sort of thinking through politics today.
While the alt-right has some presence in the streets, it is most active online.
And so, a lot of the work I've done is focused on how the alt-right uses minor social media platforms of its own making such as
8chan, Pullboards, Parlor, Bit Shoot, Gab Telegram, Odyssey and Fascist Forge,
as well as major corporate media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and Discord
for political communications. So, you know, if you break down the uses of
that the alt-right makes these platforms, minor and major, you basically see them using platforms to
create their own pages, profiles and channels,
Make themselves audible and visible in the digital mainstream, connect with, recruit, mobilize, and radicalize followers,
spread propagandistic memes, articles and videos far and wide, fundraise to fund their movement,
And it's interesting there's a lot of white nationalists millionaires that actually use these platforms to fund the alt right.
To produce and consume or 'prosume' harmful and hateful speech and, of course, to engage with Trolls,
target, swarm, intimidate, harass, bully, and attack racialized minorities.
As well as the white liberals and leftists who they see as cucks and race traitors.
I receive a lot of spam and hate mail of my Academia EDU profile because I write a lot of articles criticizing the alt-right, and then
they use that platform to send me mail saying I'm a cuck and race traitor and so on.
And then I respond to them and try to challenge their worldview.
So you know, white supremacy of course has a long history, tied with the rise of euro-colonial empires with the rise of the United States.
But the alt-right was recently incubated in the United States under the Trump presidency, and it has been going global,
thanks in part to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, or what political economists refer to as the GAFAM.
So when GAFAM embedded its operations in other societies when GAFAM embedded itself within the political,
economic structures and institutions of other societies,
they network together billions of people around the world and open these people's homes, screens ,phones, hearts and minds to
many things, including the American alt-right.
As the Silicon Valley titans expanded across borders, the American right flowed with them, forming transnational linkages with
allies in a new white nationalist internationalism.
And again we see the rise of the far-right, and these new forms of essentialist, sort of, ethnonationalism all around the world
and Zeinab also spoke to
that in the previous paper. So through the GAFAM platforms operating in Canada, American alt-right groups have virtually entered Canada, so to speak.
In early 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 51 active far-right hate groups, and on January 15 2018, I did a
quick Facebook search for all of these and I found that 28 had active Facebook presence, active Facebook profiles.
meaning that, you know, 54% of these U.S hate groups were present on Facebook and virtually President in Canada.
More recently, I did a quick Twitter search from from some significant alt right influencers and identified, many of them.
So, for example, Richard Spencer, who's a white nationalist, who calls for peaceful ethnic cleansing, I don't think it can be peaceful
and also coined the very term 'the alt-right' has over 70,000 followers on Twitter right now.
And I recently completed a study of 100 tweets with the Islamophobic alt-right hashtag, RemoveKebab,
and these construct Muslims as threats to the West, in America, and they try to rationalize genocide against Muslim people.
So the alt-right is very much active on these platforms.
That said, it would be simplistic to argue apropos media imperialism theory that I've attempted to redefine some ways and augment
for 21st century research,
that this is just a one-way flow of American alt-right hate into Canada and elsewhere, with no two way, sort of, or reciprocal flow
between these far-right groups. To the contrary, Canada has many homegrown alt-right extremists, and a recent study found
over 6000 right-wing extremist social media channels, pages, and accounts linked to Canadians.
Even still, so much alt-right propaganda does originate in the United States and it spreads around the world by platforms.
But, there's a silver lining, I think, in some ways, as much as the GAFAM are frequently associated with the alt-rights rise
and internationalization,
Their platforms are also being used by a wide variety of activists on the left to try to bring the alt right down.
So, a few examples, a New York creative worker made a Google Chrome extension called 'Stop Normalizing The Alt-Right',
which automatically replaces all search references to the alt right with neo Nazi.
On YouTube, leftist creators and democratic socialist creaters challenge alt right propaganda.
Innuendo studios' 'The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie' is a brilliant deconstruction of alt-right
recruitment and mobilization rhetorics.
Vaush and numerous democratic Socialists live streamers are frequently engaging and debates with alt-right pundents,
and demolishing their bad arguments, even humiliating them in front of, like, 70,000 viewers in real time, so
there's interesting things going on in these platforms that are also, you know, countering the far Right and the alt right sort of propaganda.
On Facebook, activists are organizing protests against the alt-right. For example, in August 2018,
an Islamophobic rally was set to occur in Nathan Phillip Square in Toronto, headed by the worldwide coalition against Islam,
which is an alt right affiliated group.
But this white nationalist rally was stopped by a number of local activists that organized a We Stop the Hate rally
on Facebook, and they actually showed up, and I showed up as well, and the actual sort of Islamophobic rally didn't happen.
Across instagram, memes spread far and wide to mock satirize, and degrade the far right. One anti-fascist slogan is
'Good Night Alt-Right' and a popular rendition of this meme features Gritty,
Basically, the Philadelphia flyers mascot that was appropriated by Anarchists and turned into their mascot and you have sort of,
this meme of Gritty pummeling Pepe the Frog, which is a symbol of the alt right as well.
So, what sort of - you know, lots of really, really cool activism happening I conceptualized this elsewhere as a new digital united
front to, sort of, combat and counter platformization of fascism.
But what we're also seeing is the GAFAM, you know, these big corporations getting involved in deleting and deplatforming
the alt-right as well. So over the past three years,
and as I show in a recently published essay in this book 'Media and Law', that was just published last month between free speech and censorship.
The corporations that own the major platforms have been taking down alt-right pages, channels, persons, and posts,
with a new privatized hate speech policy,
and censorship regime. And so I'm going to focus a little bit on that now. So how did that come to be?
Well, in the United States Federal and Judicial Main, the citizen's first amendment right to be free from state censorship
of speech defined as hateful, trumps the citizens right to be free of speech that might afflict them
with hateful invective. In the United States, the work of governing the platformization of hate speech online is not undertaken by the state,
but rather by the corporations that own the platforms. Apropos Section 230 of the shortlist communications Decency Act,
the GAFAM are not today legally obliged to uphold the first amendment rights of their users,
but the law does empower them to support or suppress their platforms users' interaction and speech
without the liabilities of a publisher or broadcaster - and Nick mentioned this earlier.
As Tarleton Gillespie puts it, section 230 lets GAFAM quote "claim the right, but not the responsibility to remove users and delete user generated content.
And largely protects these corporations from as much legal liability as possible, while ensuring they have the most discretionary power.
So what this means is that you know the GAFAM can choose or not choose to take a hands-on or hands-off approach to their
users and the speech of their users flowing across their platforms.
Nowadays, they very much take a hands on approach.
So by, you know, requiring users to click 'I agree' or 'I accept' the terms of service and then defining appropriate and inappropriate
communicative behavior and expression for users, via Community guidelines,
GAFAM decide what is and is not permitted on their platform. They preside over social media content moderation apparatuses
that combine a normative communication interaction and content framework with an enforcement and punishment mechanism.
So, very much you know the GAFAM govern speech
in very specific ways and ways that are really not determined by governments or even necessarily by forms of public consultation.
But rather simply by writing their own speech and interaction policies and then forcing them
with a mechanism that is also quite punitive. So recently GAFAM added hate speech policies to their content, moderation apparatuses.
Some are defined openly as hate speech, and others are embedded tacitly in the terms of service and Community guidelines
clauses pertaining to objectionable or offensive user content.
So these corporations have created these content policies, sometimes on their own terms, sometimes with a black box of experts.
In any case, GAFAMs hate speech policies are expected to be enforced by users themselves who are invited to self-police
the platforms and search for and report potentially hateful content to an algorithm.
And basically human, sort of, content moderators that are then paid by these corporations - usually very miserable working conditions
that are non-Unionized and contractual,
will then basically review the content that users have flagged and decide whether or not it should be taken down
based upon the corporations own speech and behavior policy.
If the content moderator finds the reported content to be in violation of the hate speech policy, they may delete it from the
platform, if they determine a user's conduct transgresses the policy they may issue a warning, suspend their account, or simply banish them.
So this sort of work of human-centered content censorship mixes with automated content review and censorship practices,
and over the past few years, we've read a lot of news stories about the GAFAM deplatforming and deleting much alt-right content.
That said, the GAFAMs reliant upon their users to enforce hate speech policies may not be the one best way to purge hate from the platforms.
Because most people use these sites for entertainment and socialization, not because they wish to police the speech and
behavior of white supremacists and white nationalists. For those of us that do have the time,
energy, and interest to govern these platforms for the GAFAM without pay, GAFAMs privatized system sometimes fail.
I'll give you an example. I participate in the Facebook group that monitors far-right organizing in Toronto, and we also monitor
far-right groups who use Facebook to propagandize by reporting them to this, you know, content moderation system.
So a few weeks ago, we found that Ronny Cameron, a Toronto-based white nationalist, has a significant presence on
Facebook ,and a following of about 14,000 people.
I'm now doing a study of Cameron's Facebook use, and over the past year, Cameron's posted hateful content and conveys the
idea that white people are going extinct and need a white-only state,
the idea that Jews and Muslims threaten white people, and the idea that BIPOC are inferior to white people.
i've got a year's worth of content that hasn't been taken down.
And last month Cameron posted a video program containing all kinds of racist disinformation starring an overt neo Nazi.
So I reported Cameron's page to Facebook as hate content, but no luck - Facebook determined that Cameron's page was not sufficiently
hateful according to its own self defined policy to be removed, noting it just might be offensive to me, but it doesn't violate its policy.
So this is interesting, with regards to Canadian communication and cultural policy and i'll just wrap up now.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of expression within reasonable limits, but I take the alt-rights hate speech
to be an unreasonable affront to Canada's multicultural democracy,
and a threat to the freedom of Canadians, especially those who have been targeted and are being targeted by the alt-rights hate, online and off.
The Canadian Criminal Code prohibits hate propaganda and the CRTC's unamended broadcasting act of '91 would not tolerate
the transmission or the flow of programs full of hate speech by radio and TV broadcasters.
But when it comes to GAFAMs platforms, the alt-rights hate too often freely flows.
When the Federal Government has some policy tools for dealing with hate speech, it for too long
follows the United States is cyber-libertarian approach,
and stood aside will GAFAM wrote and acted as judge, jury, and executioner of their own terms of service and
community guidelines pertaining to hate speech.
As a consequence, I'd argue, and apropos, I think, my larger interest in sort of the concept of media imperialism
at all levels, not just content,
The GAFAM have universalised a particular American-made mode of dealing with platformized hate speech.
The work of governing the conduct of the alt-right hate groups and hate speech on platforms, through which
millions of Canadians interact each day, has largely been exempted fomo public deliberation
and decision making, and efficiently uploaded to the oligopolistic transnational corporations that have decided for themselves,
and for the rest of us what the terms and conditions of
free speech and hate speech are, what guidelines we all must follow for them, and their bottom line.
And of course they're doing this, not because they're committed to social justice or anti racism per se,
but because they want to appease shareholders and advertisers, augment their brand identities,
nd drive maximal network effects to grow their user base and keep their Wall Street stocks bullish.
So going forward, you know, I'd say keep, sort of, participating in anti-alt-right activism online.
There's wonderful activism that's happening online and off,
but that activism can only achieve so much. I think much more should be done to govern the platformization
of hate speech with help from public interest, law, policy, and regulation.
So that's the gist of my presentation, thank you.
TANNER MIRRLEES: Okay now we're over to Rianka Singh, welcome Rianka.
RIANKA SINGH: Thank you.
Yeah so thanks to the other panelists and to the organizers of this event, and Tanner for chairing, and I especially just wanted to give
a shout out to all the Grad students who I know put in lots of work, making everything run over the past few days.
So I'm going to use my time today to sort of outline my research on what I call platform feminism
for thinking about the feminist politics of platforms.
And then I'm going to move on to talking a bit about what a feminist approach to platform studies might offer us,
and I'll do this as best as I can, in 12 minutes, but recognizing it will be, it will be brief.
So, to begin, I just want to kind of define how I'm thinking about platforms. So, I consider platforms to be any media object,
which either physically or metaphorically raise, elevate, and amplify people.
So this of course includes what we commonly consider to be digital platforms so, for example, you know social media apps like
Twitter and Facebook, which we've heard lots about today.
But I'm also thinking about the physical platforms, so I'm thinking about stages and pulpits and soapboxes. I've written about how
high-heeled shoes might be platforms, slave auction blocks, all of these things kind of have logics that I think we need to think about when
we're talking about digital platforms.
So my work in doing this is kind of challenging some of the main tenants of this growing subfield of digital platform studies so,
I'm arguing that the focus within platform studies has really tended to be on the affordances and the new sets of relationships that
take place on and through various digital platforms.
But significantly the platform is not examined as a media, and it's instead assumed to be a broker of power, I think, rather than
as an extension of it.
And so I'm approaching the platform as a medium that structures the political rather than as a surface where the political is played out.
And people like Harold A. Innis' media theories have been really, kind of, central in my approach to the platform.
Because they're providing us with this more expansive notion, right, of what a technology is so
In particular, Innis famously developed a theory of time and space biased media on which I don't have to maybe tell a bunch of
Canadian media scholars right now,
But following Innis I'm considering platforms to be spaced bias media. So they facilitate the expansion of decentralized power
and they adapt easily over time.
And we see this kind of adaptability by tracing earlier iterations of platforms and recognizing the ongoing effects that they have in
sustaining inequality among those who mount them.
And so I'm turning to this media theory, in order to ask questions about platforms' technicity. So what does it mean to have
a media object that elevates and amplified introduced into our technological environment?
And my work is really focused on asking how the platform has kind of become a condition of pocket possibility for popular feminist politics.
And so, using this approach, what I found is that the platform is an over-determined feminist object of empowerment within popular
feminist imaginaries, but also an under-theorized media or technology within digital platforms studies.
So platform feminism is a term that accounts for an elevated platform that's really become synonymous with feminist action and empowerment.
So the idea of a raised platform for women, and I want to kind of pause here and acknowledge that this is often a very universalizing
notion of women, has really come to dominate popular imaginaries of what a feminist politics looks like, but also what constitutes stuff as digital activism.
So the platform is this medium that appears again and again, and rather innocuously, at sites of struggle and especially in the digital age,
so since 2016, the platforms have been especially tied to expressions of what Sarah Banet-Weiser has called popular feminism.
So, for example, the women's march with its pink knitted hats and its woody signage emerged in 2017 is a symbolic
grand counter-narrative to the Trump administration,
and, alongside the march, Me Too, and Time's Up are these other expressions of popular feminism that have dominated both popular
discourse and scholarship in feminists media studies over the past few years.
And so, as part of my research for this project, I was attending women's marches, and following Me Too discussions in the news.
And I was also tracking their responses by feminist media studies scholars to these popular movements really closely as well.
And as many Black and Brown and Indigenous and Queer scholars and journalists and activists of all since pointed out,
all of these events were overwhelmingly straight and white, and that was both in composition, but also in how they were organized.
So it wasn't just the megaphones or the Patagonia downfield jackets are they expensive granola bars and the pussy hats
right that were straightening and racing these movements.
Nor was it the fact that Me Too only gained popularity when white celebrities started tweeting that they, too, had been subject to
sexual abuse in Hollywood, even though we know now that the hashtag was used by Black civil rights activists Tarana Burke, more than a decade earlier.
Instead, for me, it was the role of the Platform, this object that significantly mediated all of these events and structured these popular movements
n ways that were really being missed upon first glance, so significantly, each of these recent feminist mobilizations has relied on digital media
platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook.
And such social media platforms really lend themselves to making feminism visible and accessible. So digital platforms circulate
news about upcoming marches, and they serve to re-elevate, right, the celebrities and the feminist heroes who stand on stages and make speeches to rally a crowd.
So feminism through the platform is this kind of digestible type of feminism. What these recent popular examples will show us
is that the platform is almost reduced feminist politics to simply showing up and making your voice heard.
And so, for me, the presence of the Platform, does the signifying work of democracy in action,
it's a democratic veneer for the people, of the potential for social change.
So an elevated idea or phrase or thought or body or slogan, is the idea of democracy, facilitated by the platform,
even though we know, of course, that only one person can speak at a time from their place on a platform.
And so, we'll also have seen this too in the upholding of what I call Platform Power, during the recent insurrection at the US Capitol
and its aftermath. And later in this kind of brief talk i'll say more about that.
So in doing research for this project, I found that what we might focus on instead is how people and specifically, Black, Brown,
Indigenous, Queerm and disabled folks resist differently when being
elevated by the platform, either isn't made available, or isn't the goal in the first place.
So we're still resisting in a technological environment where platforms exist, and what I found is that they seem to be
organizing not with platforms, but in despite of them.
So, in other words what my research has found, is that through these groups, a political utility of the platform is not assumed,
and if there is any political utility to the platform
it's not at all similar to what we see in these, kind of, popular forms of feminist action, again when I've turned platform feminism.
So, for example, I've studied the indigenous practice of circle dances, which have been performed as part of Idle No More and more
recently the (inaudible) movements.
And as circle dancers, no one body or person out of sync, it's a communal mode of resistance or amplification and visibility are not the aim.
Or I think of the thousands of South American feminists who have been disguising their faces using bandanas and fabric,
to cover their eyes during large scale dance movement that
broke out at the end of 2019 in protest of ongoing issues of violence against women.
So at these protests participants perform a choreographed dance while chanting the words to a song which in English translates to
"A Rapist in Your Path"
And you can find illustrated guides that teach each step of the choreographed dance online, and this is a way of
ensuring that no body and nobody is out of sync.
And so, this example highlights how a logic of the Platform, which is really to make information visible, often
must be subverted in order to ensure safety through opacity.
So instead of thinking of resistance that's bound to the platform,
I'm turning my attention to the corporeal and focusing on tactics of resistance that are born out of debt differential relationships
to space. So notably too, none of these examples place a singular figure or voice or Twitter thread or personal story at their centre.
And so here are a couple more examples. In February 2018, at the Blankets For Tina walk in Toronto, a group of people wrap themselves
in blankets in memory of Tina Fontaine.
She was a Sagkeeng First Nations girl, whose killer was acquitted of her murder, and the use of blankets, was at once a resistance tactic
and a symbol for communal care and safety and warm.
In 2016, members of Black Lives Matter TO camped outside of the Toronto police headquarters for two weeks in protest of
the police shooting of Andrew Loku.
So for those who camped out, this space became one of community healing and building, according to Black Lives Matter
co founder Alexandra Williams.
So these few examples are instances of spatial strategies of resistance that again have less to do with the amplification or the
stepping up and on to platforms, and more to do with factors related to the survival of bodies
that have the experiences that actually require consideration of such factors.
So I just want to end by showing you how the shift and thinking about platforms as media objects that extend power, I think,
will continue to be important for media and communication studies.
And again what maybe this kind of approach, which i'm calling a feminist platform studies might offer us.
So, for example, the January 6th 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol shows us how platforms will continue to dominate media studies
scholarship. This is most obvious, I think, in the ongoing discussions of what it means to deplatform Donald Trump and other right-wing
ac- about to call them activists, but other insurrectionists which both Tanner and Nick have spoken to today.
And so, media and communication studies scholars, who do by the work on platforms and their policies have already begun
pointing out the need to focus on
platforms' content moderation policies, and they argue that we should be worried about, kind of, platform companies '
power to act as gatekeepers to to public discourse.
But during this time i've been really captured by by images that I think also matter just as much for understanding digital culture and platforms in the political.
First is this image which I'm sure will be really recognizable to a lot of you by now, and it's one of the insurrectionists stealing the House podium.
And that there was so much outcry from both the left and the right about this specific media object being taken, I think,
shows us a political investment in media objects that bestow the power to speak.
Even more recently Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is of course done much worse since this photo was taken,
wore a censored mask while speaking into a microphone on the House floor. So it's kind of a stunning moment of a woman who
is absolutely not being censored, but actually being given a platform,
showing us the limits of platforms and their technical capacity to afford people a voice and the right to speak.
And so I think looking at these images, we need to ask why and if the right to speak publicly and via the platform and if
deplatforming are actually going to alter our material conditions.
And so, related to this is the second set of images that I think we might focus on, and there are of the Black and Brown folks
who are tasked with cleaning up the capital, following the insurrection.
So my work makes the argument that Feminist strategizing needs to go beyond the platform. The underpinning proposition here is that
feminism must go under the platform, behind it, and recognize the organizing Labor the politics of social reproduction, the intertwining
and often at odd demands of care and visibility, and the uneven desires for legibility that are so often
obscured by the actual medium of the Platform.
And so we see in these images examples of the organizing Labor and the politics of social reproduction so often left to Black and Brown
people that have obviously been obscured by our investment and who has the right to speak.
And so just to kind of end my ongoing work is to make a case for a feminist media theory of that platform.
And so, this is work that will continue to intervene and add to the field of platform studies, and I'm really motivated by t
the fact that this approach to the platform as a media object and as a technology that shapes feminist and race politics
I don't think is being accounted for yet in platform studies. And so that's the kind of way I'm trying to add that to this discussion.
Thanks.
TANNER MIRRLEES: Thanks so much Rianka.
Wow such an interesting set of presentations with so many actions to, you know, to draw between all six of them.
I think we've got about 15, 20 minutes for audience Q&A and discussion.
So I want to welcome people, if you have a question to type it into the chat bar or, alternatively, if you'd like to
raise your virtual hands, you can speak, sort of, verbally as well.
Okay I've got a question from Anwar. Anwar, welcome.
Anwar: Thank you. My question is for Alex.
I was wondering, are you actually seeing
Anwar: more, I guess, hackers or programmers
that are interested in actually adopting Ghidra, or is it a lot like Tor, be sort of anonymity platform that everyone, you know,
nobody actually uses it because it's sort of connected to to the government in that way, so just wondering if you could expand on that a bit more.
ALEX DEAN CYBULSKI: Yeah, thank you for your question Anwar.
Yeah, the uptake in this software, the International Security software Ghidra, has been dramatic, like it's been very successful
you already see modules coming online where people are designing
their own software and, of course, there is a period where I think there was kind of, like, a suspicion.
About "Oh, the NSA is going to give hackers tools, how do we know then they're not just going to - that's the perfect excuse
to spy on a hacker" but the other side of it being, of course, that it's open-source software and, you know, these are the
last people that you would want to stick your foot in the fire of
like, spying on because they're the most likely culprits to find that kind of software. So yeah, so the the uptake of this software has been
really dramatic because it costs nothing compared to, you know, the professional tool which costs $6,000.
You know it's been very successful there, the other side of it, too, I talked about a little bit in the talk was that it supports
new and emerging computing architectures, that aren't traditionally covered by existing tools. And of course that's
very applicable to the NSAs mission directive, which is to spy on people
successfully across multiple platforms. So yeah, the interesting engagement with that, especially now that there are
commoditized markets for finding vulnerabilities and software like bug bounties,
has really, really driven adoption of the software and I think in a pretty profound way. Hope that answers your question.
Anwar: Yes. Thank you.
TANNER: Thank you Alex and Anwar.
Nick's just going to depart and another minute and a half, so Nick I'm wondering before you do so, if you have any reflections or
thoughts on the gist of any of the presentations, or if you'd like to leave us with any questions or probes.
NICK DYER-WITHEFORD: Thanks, very much indeed to everyone for what I thought was an immensely valuable
set of presentations. I guess if I could stay what I would really like
to hear actively would be
You, Tanner,
in dialogue with Derek about the
I suggest somewhat contrary views of
potential socialist platforms with you're putting emphasis very strongly on the need for
governance functions, such as speech regulation,
and Derek's recent article outlining what I would call a more left-libertarian version of extreme decentralization and
I don't know if you want to take up that invitation to get into it and I
regret very much, but I have to go properly at 3:15, but since you asked me, that would be my provocation, thank you.
TANNER: Thanks so much Nick, I appreciate that.
Well, I'm not sure, would anyone else have any thoughts about that tension between speech regulation, whether that be
undertaken by the companies that own the platforms or or by a government regulator that's very much the hot topic of the day.
I've been following Twitter reaction to Bill C-10, and the disinformation from the far right is intense the way that's been
interpreted as sort of an authoritarian thought control exercise.
Even though it's, again, going to be amended and rolled out in different ways, because programs were removed, but
would anyone like to sort of weigh in on those discussions? You know, Derek has a wonderful essay in this years socialist register on platform socialism.
I've been doing a lot of work also in that area but i'm curious to what what people think
about this tension given given your own sort of studies.
You know, Andre on polarization, and you know Rianka's sort of work on platform feminism. Does this does sort of,
you know, speech regulation have any role in sort of a democratic society? And we can just take this as the last three minutes
for discussion, if you like, and wrap up by 3:20ish or so or 3:22.
Oh, I see a hand by Steph Hill, hey steph welcome.
Steph Hill: hi everyone ,and thanks so much for this panel is really, really fascinating to listen in on.
Steph Hill: I'm not sure that I can speak to the broader question of whether speech regulation has a place, but I wanted to
pick up a little bit on the conversation that was happening, a bit. Advertisers and
some of the things that came up in your presentation actually, Tanner, about - you're talking about how so much of
the regulation of the alt-right is being done as volunteer activist Labor, essentially the platforms aren't doing it themselves,
even though theoretically it's their job.
And there's sort of a push for government regulation, but this fear of fragmentation in the sphere of its abuse by
governments that maybe don't value a freedom of expression.
And I'm curious a little bit basically whose job is it? Because I think in the tension between those things you're seeing advertisers like
The global alliance for responsible media rolling out their own definition of hate speech and their own plan for how it's going to be
governed on the platform. So you're seeing this very commercial-defined version of the public interest and so I'm kind of wondering between
unpaid activists Labor, national governments in the pitfalls there, commercial regulation of speech, and I don't know, maybe a
civil society? Like, whose job should it be? What's an approach that actually might move us forward without sort of falling into one of these pits. If that makes sense.
TANNER MIRRLEES: Wonderful wonderful question, I mean, my own position is to basically sort of suggest that you know within the Charter,
we have a notion of reasonable speech, right? And speech that can be found sort of unreasonable or unjustified like speech calling for genocide,
doesn't really have a place in a Liberal Democratic multicultural polity. Now libertarians and the internet freedom community of any
perspective or politics may fundamentally disagree with the Charter in that regard,
but I think one of the major problems in Canada is that we haven't even really been upholding the Charter, you know?
With regard to notions of reasonable speech, we have hate speech in the criminal code, and it's not enforced by by any of these sort of policing agencies.
Very infrequently as it enforced. And so very much you know for 15 years the companies have been operating according to an
American cyber libertarian framework that accords with the FCC.
And we haven't actually had this discussion in Canada, as contentious as it is and what I'm seeing on Twitter and elsewhere
is Canadian libertarians on the right, and the left sort of being like "Oh, it's going to be an authoritarian
dictatorship! Trudeau is a dictator! It's going to be thought control!"
Without actually stopping and saying, well what actually policy and regulation do we currently have on the books beyond just
even the digital environment that could be mobilized in this way.
To stop hate speech, I mean do we agree or not, that hate speech doesn't have a place, is reasonable speech, and, you know,
these are fairly big philosophical questions, but I just would like to sort of have that dialogue at least.
But thank you.
And capacity, yeah. Like, who does it? What institution? What entity, right?
Has the capacity resources to do this? And there's the major risks of abuse as well, so there's something that can be quite tempting
with a libertarian position, right?
Given, we know the relations between the state and capital, and the abuses that States have undertaken in the name of the
public interest and national good. Very risky.
Oh Alex votes for the NSA. Well Alex, I mean, yeah, fascinating research there and I'd love to read more of what you're working on as
well, in addition to, sort of, you know, Rianka.
Because there's so many interesting connections here to be drawn. Both like sort of the politics of platforms and in Alex's case
the military-industrial complex and the security state, the platforms.
Thomas wrote: (inaudible) say that free speech is a dead end and what we need is a lot -
There you go. Thank you for joining us, Thomas. Well well well said, and an excellent quote.
I mean every society, I think, you know, the citizens within a society have a responsibility to engage in sustained deliberative
discussion about normative frames governing our conduct and speech and,
that's that's reasonable and what the outcome of that is sort of yet to be determined, but we should have that conversation.
So this has been really, really exciting.
And, of course, when I'm reading much of the Jacobin crowd's work, they're worried of the boomerang effect, right,
deplatforming the far right will ultimately come back to hit the left and the democratic Socialists in the head pretty hard.
And that's also a risk in the history of the United States and Canada, but we haven't seen it happen, yet.
I think we've seen sort of ubiquitous sort of you know socialist politics online,
that has not been treated in the same way as far-right speech has. So, we'll see how long that lasts, if-
So anyhow, I just wish we could chat longer and longer, but I think that our panels coming to end.
Rianka, do you have any final words?
Given Andre's spoken, Dereks spoken, Alex's spoken.
RIANKA SINGH: Yeah. No- TANNER: I will ask you, Rianka.
RIANKA SINGH: I was - I think what Thomas said, I was trying to form a response. Yeah, which is, I think this kind of overemphasis on who has the right to speak
is tied to like a logic of platforms and are - and I think that over-investment is obscuring how people actually
survive. And, so yeah, I agree, from a different angle But yeah, thanks everyone for all this.
TANNER: Thank you Rianka. Okay everybody, well, we hope that we'll see some of you, or all of you tomorrow for a
great set of sessions. We've got two more days of the Conference, and a lot of really, really good panels
still set to watch. So, wishing you all a happy day and thanks to everyone who's attended.
TANNER: Bye bye.