Russian media are overwhelmed with stories about the omnipotent American IT platforms that banned the American president and suddenly began to rule the world
In the morning and evening TV and radio broadcasts, on talk shows and in newspapers, not to mention social networks and TG channels, everyone is heatedly discussing how terrible FB and Twitter are, and whether it is censorship or “this is different”, whether Trump will create a Telegram channe;, whether Telegram and Signal will replace the totalitarian Twitter and Facebook and the like.
To me personally, all this does not seem very interesting. And that’s why.
This is old news.
Trump may not have read The Trilogy of Desire by the great American writer Theodore Dreiser, about the adventures of the mighty financier and capitalist Cowperwood. But we read it.
In it, Dreiser describes how, at the end of the 19th century in Chicago, a group of city fathers (mixed of Democrats and Republicans), who owned all the media, killed, squashed and drove out a cheerful, quirky and rich newcomer who tried to become the first guy in Chicago. The newcomer took over all the railways and sweet concessions for the construction of ordinary roads, bought up a corrupt municipality. And the enemies used all the techniques we already knew – a media attack, hiring street lumpen for the “Maidan” (rebellers), shouting out everyone who tried to oppose the group, and the like. Cowperwood failed to buy or bribe the media and the rebellers.
As a result, the municipality, completely bought by Cowperwood, turned away from him, frightened by media pressure and shouting from the streets, and deprived him of concessions and other favors. Cowperwood was the smartest, most energetic and cunning of all the capitalists in the city – but he could not do anything, lost his business and left Chicago. Being an alpha predator is not enough, you have to deal with politics.
So managing politics through media attacks is a common story in America. Actually, the overwhelming media domination of the Obama-Clinton-Biden group of the so-called liberals, that is, the union of global financiers, media professionals, IT specialists, capitalists and the military, is also not new. Google, FB, Twitter have been “drowned” in favor of Obama and Clinton for the past 12 years – about which there has been quite a lot of research.
It would be naive to think that their brazen “coming out” of the last weeks was sudden and unexpected or was caused by “appeals from labor collectives”, outraged by the crimes of the bloody Trump regime.
It is also naive to think that it is the global American IT platforms that have seized power and are doing what they want, with unlimited money and audiences. It is enough to watch the video of 2018, where Mark Zuckerberg, summoned to the Senate, in an ill-fitting uncomfortable suit blushes for four hours, sweats and makes excuses in front of congressmen for having found few traces of Russian Hackers ™ in Trump’s election campaign – 2016, to understand that it is not IT platforms in America are the main ones. In 2019, Mark made excuses for another four hours – in the US Congress – for trying to launch his own cryptocurrency.
You can also watch a more recent video of the meeting of the four IT giants with the congress in July 2020, right before the elections, where the platforms grumbled for not favoring the Democrats enough and demanded a promise not to interfere with Biden’s victory.
In general, it is not Mark who runs the Congress, but the Congress by Mark. Or rather, a curator sent to Mark. It is more or less known that in almost all IT companies over the past 15-20 years, curators from the defense industry or intelligence have been introduced to the top management or the board of directors.
HR security Eric Schmidt has run Google in general since the early 2000s. With these curators, it would seem ridiculous: former CIA director Leon Panetta comes to Oracle (a database manufacturer, what does the CIA have to do with it), US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice – to Dropbox (a manufacturer of a network drive for transferring files – how is national security related to it?) and the like.
But it becomes clear that this is not at all funny when Oracle suddenly starts buying the American business of the Chinese company TikTok at the request of the US administration, and Amazon cloud hosting suddenly demolishes the Trumpists’ poor social network.
Personally, as a software developer, this is not what interests me. I cannot understand why Trump has so shamefully leaked the media war. I already wrote in 2016 that it is a political science myth that Trump won the previous election due to incredible new technologies for manipulating audience micro-segments in social networks, with the help of the innovative firm Cambridge Analytica and other egg-headed scientific wizards. In fact, Trump’s money for promotion on the Internet was mostly stolen, as people in the know say, and his campaign ads were seen mainly by bots – precisely because he does not understand this and became a victim of scammers. And he won at the expense of his fresh and attractive message for “old America” (as Victor Marakhovsky calls it).
Clinton’s media dominance in 2016 was overwhelming: out of five thousand “top” American media, only 25 were “drowned” for Trump, far from the top ones. And the remaining 95 percent “stoked” for Clinton, like all Internet companies Google, FB, Twitter and others.
It seems that no one especially rigged the elections then, because there was no need – everyone was convinced that with such dominance in the media air, Trump had no chance.
The shock of Trump’s victory showed Democrats that media pressure isn’t everything. They learned this lesson and this time they prepared better. Namely: instead of general indirect, ideological management of IT platforms, they sent them curators to the governing bodies to block Trump and the Trumpists overnight, just by phone; built technologies for falsifying elections (including pushing through voting by e-mail, with the help of which hundreds of thousands of homogeneous letters were then thrown in for Biden); built a system to legitimize falsifications (including at the level of higher courts, which then rejected Trump’s claims “on the way”); agreed with all institutions for the transfer of power that they recognize the victory of their candidate in any fraud, with banks, so that they close Trump’s accounts. And so on.
That is, they learned the lesson and did their homework.
But why didn’t Trump learn it? He also promised in 2017 to investigate the activities of pro-Cinton journalists and top media outlets during the elections and punish them for bias and media falsification. But he didn’t. Why?
He saw what was happening with media IT platforms, could not help but notice more and more alarming signals about the preparation of an attack on himself and his supporters (the “removal” of the Trumpists and opponents of the liberal group from social networks and the Internet began immediately after 2016, notes like “The president is lying” on his tweets also did not start during the 2020 elections).
Why didn’t he create his own media? Developing a technical analogue of Twitter or FB is a quite foreseeable and real task, now it is much easier and cheaper to do it than at the dawn of social networks, there are as many tools and specialists on the market. It’s a matter of tens of millions of dollars and a year of work – which Trump had.
And then shout to your 80 million Twitter subscribers “come with me” – and here’s a soaring independent social network that immediately overcame the friction of rest, the chicken-and-egg problem.
Well, here it is – someone (perhaps Trump or his Trumpists) created from scratch a Parler network independent of the Biden-Clinton people – technically working, but small and vulnerable, destroyed last week in just a couple of days. But if you are counting on the Parler network in the media war (or in general it is yours), then buy a reliable hosting for it, not on a biased Amazon controlled by opponents. Create your own hoster, buy servers, after all. Congress won’t budget for this? But Trump is a billionaire, he can afford it, it would seem?
All of Trump’s undertakings and projects leave a vague feeling of incompleteness, indecision, a stop before achieving a result. Some American Yanukovych.
What is the reason for this? Does he not understand media and IT?
Maybe this is the syndrome of a good boy, as has been written many times, the reluctance of him and his conservative followers to break the rules or go to direct confrontation, concern for the “good of America”?
Perhaps he did not expect such aggressive, dastardly and impudent behavior of his opponents (rigging, media attacks, blocking, betrayal of the apparatus)? Yes, villains always have a wider arsenal of means. But Trump doesn’t look like a nun either.
Or is it an inability to work systematically, pride, an illusion that he is already handsome, that he can rule the country and the world with the help of tweets in his super-account? Well, it would seem that he is a smart man, a successful super-businessman from the Forbes list.
You can choose an explanation to your taste. But the media war, elections and political careers as a result of this indecision are lost by Trump. The desertion of the Trumpists to Signal or “our” Telegram, the continuation of the media struggle, it seems, no longer solves anything. Power changed hands. And the new owners are systematic and ruthless. Participants in the storming of the Capitol (not counting those killed during the assault) will be given monstrous American sentences of 25-30 years for “internal terrorism” and an attempted coup, the rest of the Trumpists will be banned and blocked, Trump himself is already closed bank accounts, he is facing impeachment, and most likely, a real criminal case for “provoking” the same assault on parliament.
In general, Trump did not learn his lesson and “received half a four for half a poem”. But we cannot afford it. We are in an even worse position than the American president: we do not at all control our popular FB, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, in which up to 50-60 percent of all accounts of Runet users, and these platforms are in the hands of our geopolitical adversary, who calls us an enemy #1 in all of their strategies. They are already banning our channels and websites, engaging in propaganda – in general, they give us the same indirect signals that they gave Trump in 2016-2020.
Let’s learn from other people’s mistakes at last.
Igor Ashmanov, RIA