WR 2: Disinformation, scams, satellites, and war
Weekly Reckoning for the week of 9/10/23
Welcome to the Weekly Reckoning. What do you know, we made it to week 2. How long do they say it takes to make a habit?
The Reckonnaisance
X is being flooded with disinformation about the Israel-Hamas war
Nutshell: After Elon Musk gutted Twitter’s trust & safety team, surprise surprise, we’re paying the price with an unprecedented amount of disinformation on X.
More: 1/5 social media accounts discussing the Israel-Hamas war are fake (according to an Israeli analysis firm), and are especially active on X (where they can buy a blue checkmark and look legitimate). Rumors that nuclear weapons have been authorized, posts from fake BBC reporters, and even video game graphics being passed off as war footage have been circulating with little to no action from the platform. Even intelligence researchers are being duped. It doesn’t help that Musk himself is recommending antisemitic accounts known for spreading disinformation. However, the EU is putting him on blast.
Why you should care: Even if you’re not on X (and kudos to you if you’re not), lots of people get their information on X and sources informed by X. False information leaks offline, and by creating an online environment that can’t be trusted, we’re destabilizing a major—and previously fairly reliable—source of news without a viable alternative.
US Big Tech companies are trying to stop India’s laws on manipulative design
Nutshell: India is working on a law banning “dark patterns,” design elements that manipulate you into doing what they want, but American Big Tech platforms are lobbying against it.
More: Dark patterns are banned in the EU and California (think: how difficult it is to cancel a paid subscription, a surprise undisclosed shipping fee, a product page where there’s always “only a few left!”). Now, India is trying to ban them, too, but a lobbying group representing Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and X complains that regulating them could “stagnate the growth” of the digital economy and cause regulatory overlap. Instead, they say that a self-regulatory framework suffices. In other words, they want to be able to keep using dark patterns in India.
Why you should care: As dark patterns crackdowns increase in the EU and US (with the FTC recently taking aim at them), it seems like Big Tech companies are trying to export their scuzziest practices to emerging economies. A leopard can wear a coat that makes it DSA compliant, but it can’t change the spots underneath.
Social media scammers are making billions of dollars, according to the FTC
More: The number is likely far higher, since most frauds are unreported, and are only from the US. The most frequent scams are purchase scams—often via Instagram and Facebook ads—but the biggest losses are from fake investment schemes. Interestingly, Gen Z is more likely to be scammed online.
Why you should care: Obviously you don’t want to be scammed. And you may think you’re too smart to fall for scams, but they’re becoming more and more sophisticated. Social media plus AI could create extremely realistic cons. AI scam calls are on the rise—imagine you get a call and it sounds like your child, or your cousin, or your best friend asking for money. Suppose they say it’s urgent. Wouldn’t you open your banking app? Scammers can imitate peoples’ voices with voice data from social media and identify their loved ones to target. AI could also make romance scams—second to investment scams in dollars lost—more prevalent and realistic through deepfakes, voice synthesis, and chatbots (like ChatGPT). And, of course, deepfakes could be used for good old-fashioned extortion.
Amazon is gearing up to challenge SpaceX’s Starlink
Nutshell: Amazon is launching small satellites into space to create a satellite constellation to provide Internet connectivity. The largest and most well-known of these services is Starlink, owned by Elon Musk.
More: These are the first two of 3,236 planned satellites. Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have been criticized for making astronomy harder with light pollution, and the potential for increasing space debris. However, they have the potential to bring Internet connectivity to underserved areas—except you’ll be locked into a service owned by an American Big Tech company, which didn’t go great when Facebook tried.
Why you should care (even if you’re not an astronomer): LEO satellite constellations could provide high-speed broadband with lower long-distance latency than fiber networks, so you may eventually have another option besides your ISP (which, in the US, you probably didn’t get to choose). There’s also a fun thread of “Bezos v. Musk space race” here. Obviously, Bezos is trying to compete with Starlink, but Amazon also contracted with three different companies to launch these satellites and included Bezos’s Blue Origin but not Musk’s SpaceX. So, watch this space for more potential petty billionaire drama. Fun fact: there’s a Wikipedia page for “billionaire space race.”
Extra Reckoning
I’ve been thinking about proportionality in the Israel-Hamas war. First, I should make clear: I support Israel’s right to exist, even if I don’t support the historical actions of its government in Palestine, and I support Palestine’s right to existence and self-determination, even if I don’t support Hamas. And I find it deeply ironic—and distressing—when I see people online, including some of my peers, celebrating Hamas’s actions.1
Palestinian resistance is justified, but Hamas’s terrorism is not justified resistance. In general, if you’re celebrating the slaughter of kids and kidnapping of grandmas, you should maybe re-evaluate.
That being said, I worry about the proportionality of Israel’s response. Israel has every right to defend itself, and I realize that as a non-Jewish, non-Muslim, non-Israeli, non-Palestinian Westerner, my thoughts don’t count very much here, but it’s my newsletter so I’m going to say my piece.
When we see images of innocent concertgoers being gunned down and hear rumors of babies being beheaded in their cribs, we want in our gut to respond overwhelmingly. But there are international rules of war for a reason. While there’s an inherent irony to the phrase “just war,” we created those rules to restrain ourselves when we’re blinded by a fog of rage and despair. And I worry that in the aftermath of “Israel’s 9/11,” we may fall into the same trap that the US did after its 9/11, when it embarked on a campaign of mass surveillance, extrajudicial killings, and torture that killed thousands of civilians abroad and encouraged xenophobic abuses at home. It is a fact—a terrible, tragic one that we should never forget and always be ashamed of—that civilians die in war, and civilians will die in Gaza.2 But Israel is exacerbating civilian suffering through the extent of its bombing and by imposing a total blockade, which the EU says is in violation of international law. Gaza is “tiny, crowded, and hard to escape”—one of the most densely populated area in the world—and in the face of a ground invasion without electricity, food, or escape, the situation for the people is only going to get worse. Gazans need an opportunity to escape, as the international rules of war demand.
Israel is justified in responding to Hamas’s attacks, but I hope that it and the international community are able to remember that, always, the people most affected by war are the civilians who had the least role in starting it.
I Reckon…
that the future of war might be low-tech, and all the more brutal for it.
Yes, Israel’s government has done terrible things to Palestinians. Guess what? America’s government has done terrible things to Native Americans. And in Iraq. And Vietnam. And Afghanistan. (I could go on.) The UK did terrible things across half the globe. Much of the West is founded on colonialism and slavery. I mention this not to justify Israel’s actions in Palestine, but to make the point that if you support the destruction of Israel, you should take a good hard look at the country where you live.
Each and every one of them should be mourned, as should the civilians who have already died due to Israel’s actions in Palestine.
Thumbnail generated by DALL-E 2 with the prompt “Disinformation, scams, satellites, and war, abstract impressionist painting”.