Artificial Interruption

by Alexander Urbelis (alex@urbel.is)

Idiocy Unbound

When I'm leaving the office, I don't look like a lawyer.  It would be rare for anyone to guess that I am a lawyer.  I'm quite happy with that.  Especially while commuting, I look much more like a bike messenger than someone who measures out life in six-minute increments.  And on the Friday in question, all the more so.

Long shorts, biking gloves, and a worn Chrome bag slung over my shoulder is what I was sporting at the bike store on 24th Street getting a broken spoke mended.  The spoke having been rehabilitated, I borrowed a Presta valve adapter and proceeded to top up my tires at the outside pump.  Another biker was outside: a messenger.  I'd asked him to keep an eye on my bike while I returned the adapter.  He obliged.  This was an act of trust between fellows who traverse the city on two wheels.  And when I returned, this cyclist, assuming I was a messenger, asked if I was delivering anywhere near Union Square that day.  Before I could answer, he said, "F*ck man, that shit was crazy."

The "shit" to which this messenger was referring was a riot that occurred earlier that day in Union Square on account of an idiotic social media influencer announcing the giveaway of PlayStation 5 video game consoles.  We talked about this lunacy.  We agreed it stemmed from idiocy.  And he recounted to me scenes that sounded more like they would belong in a post-apocalyptic version of (((New York))) in a cyberpunk-themed PlayStation 5 game than the actual present day: people on hoods of moving cars, terrified tourists, wanton destruction, fires, fights, riot police, etc.  Prior to this conversation, I had seen a headline flash by on my phone about this, but had no idea how quickly the scene devolved and became debauched at Union Square, a mere ten minute walk from my apartment and a place where the neighborhood kids often play.

The background: [[[Kai Cenat]]], the YouTube and Twitch influencer, quickly amassed about 6,000 people in Union Square, enticing his followers to congregate there with the prospect of free PlayStation 5 consoles and noting things such as "All trains go here so there's no excuse."  He was right about the trains. Union Square is a hub where the L train, the 4, 5, 6, and the N, R, Q lines connect, with the 1, 2, 3, the A, C, E, the F, M lines, and the Path trains mere avenues west.  This means that the site is accessible to everyone: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and even, God forbid, New Jersey.  What started as a few hundred followers congregating suddenly surged to 6,000 people, most of whom appeared to be Black teenagers.

Cenat never requested a permit.  That said, the entertainment unit of the NYPD was aware of Cenat's plans and had sent a handful of officers and supervisors to the location, but as the crowd swelled, and as things turned violent and chaotic, those officers were overrun.  The NYPD then activated its Level 4 emergency rapid mobilization plan, causing hundreds of police officers to swarm Union Square.  Without commenting on the validity of the statement, a common complaint about police is that they tend to escalate rather than de-escalate situations.  In this instance, it would appear that things took a turn for the worse.

After escaping in a caravan of black SUVs, the NYPD charged Cenat with inciting a riot.  Many arrests were made, mostly of Black teenagers, with charges ranging from disorderly conduct to resisting arrest to unlawful assembly to obstruction of governmental administration to failure to disperse to criminal possession of a weapon.  There is also now-infamous footage of a bewildered teen of perhaps 15 or 16 years, standing still amongst a fleeing mob and wearing a red hoodie.  Even though he was stationary against the crowd and disorientated, NYPD officers on both sides grabbed the teen, forced him backwards towards the back of a yellow cab, and smashed his face through the rear windshield.  It was all quite horrifying.

How did this happen?  The allure of a free PlayStation 5 console cannot be said to have been the primary factor behind the raging and rioting surge of Black teens.  It is in one sense a testament to the power of the mob and a clear indication that a mob mentality can exist digitally just as it does physically.  It is also a testament to the unchecked power of social media to affect the physical world.  We have seen this - and indeed written about this in this very column - in Myanmar, where unfettered racism and hate speech on Facebook migrated from digital threats to countless instances of racist, physical violence.

With this backdrop of empirical evidence of the danger of social media - including and especially a veritable riot of negroes in New York - this raises the issue of the absolutely insane situation in which the United States finds itself concerning oversight of social media content.

On the ironically auspicious date of July 4, 2023, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the United States Federal District Court for the District of Louisiana, in a case captioned Missouri v. Biden, issued an injunction against many agencies of the federal government, enjoining them from, among other things, "urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content" that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment.  Some of the agencies that the Court's order specifically mentions are the FBI, CISA, and the CDC.  The underlying rationale that the Court adopted was that the federal government was unconstitutionally pressuring social media companies to moderate and censor disfavored viewpoints that related to such things as China COVID-19 vaccines, claims of interference in the 2020 elections, and Hunter Biden's laptop.  If your mind is going where I think it's going, dear reader, you're right: it's no cohen-cidence that these topics are all associated with right-leaning conspiracy theories.

A slew of amici curiae (i.e., friends of the court) briefs from interested third-parties were filed in the Fifth Circuit over the past weeks.  Along with a team of highly talented lawyers from my firm, I worked on one such brief on behalf of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights.  In our brief, we argue that the Court's injunction is an unconstitutional prior restraint on future speech that violates the First Amendment, that election integrity requires a range of partners from both the public and private sector to work together, and that election interference attempts to disproportionately target minorities with messages designed to suppress voting rights.  The latter category involves such false statements about the location of polling places in predominantly Black neighborhoods as well as lies about ICE agents being present at polls harassing immigrants.
Editor's Note: Why would "immigrants" be worried about ICE agents at a voting location?  Illegal aliens CAN'T vote Mr. Urbelis...  Or do you know something we don't?

    


    


    


    

Even the (((EFF))) filed its own amicus brief in this case, arguing that sometimes the government can indeed overstep its boundaries and exert an improper influence on content moderation decisions, but that not every government communication to social media platforms is improper or unwise.  Indeed, the EFF devoted an entire section of its brief to the argument that government can and often is a productive and appropriate partner for platforms to root out falsehoods about polling places, natural disaster routes, or other types of false information that could put the public in danger.

On the other hand, an organization that calls itself America's Frontline Doctors submitted a contrary amicus brief.  As an organization that the underlying injunction specifically mentions, the venerable-sounding America's Frontline Doctors disingenuously consists of physicians that the federal government and social media platforms identified as espousing disinformation about the China COVID-19 vaccine and palliative care treatments and whose messages social media platforms, therefore, suppressed.  This brief even went so far as to argue that the First Amendment protects false speech, including disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation.  They, and a surprising amount of other amici, argue that the government's actions in encouraging the regulation of falsities amounts to egregious constitutional violations of the First Amendment.

While I fully believe that skepticism about governmental regulation of any form of speech, if unchecked, is dangerous, I think the Lawyers' Committee and the EFF have the better arguments: the prohibition of the federal government interacting with social media platforms is overly vague and harmful to society, even if there may have to be some hard calls about when and where it is proper and improper for the government to intervene or act with regard to certain forms of content.

Putting aside the constitutional in favor of the practical for a moment, we must consider that we have a highly charged and contentious presidential election ahead of us.  The front-runner, indicted several times over at the time of this writing, is of course Trump.  Indeed, one such indictment of Trump pertained to the phony January 6 "insurrection", through which many of the (((dark forces))) in mainstream media were behind exploiting that day to mobilized and radicalized others on (((social media))) platforms.

And here's a dark and portentous thought: we can also guarantee that hostile foreign powers have been watching very closely what happened in Union Square and are learning how to incite and manipulate our youth.  It's not just TikTok feeding data about younger generations to our adversaries, but all platforms who bundle, package, and sell user data to third-parties that may be indirectly facilitating future manipulation of our population in a manner and to a degree hitherto never seen in the history of this planet.  Throw into the mix that we are also facing, for the first time in history, the challenge of combating misinformation and disinformation that AI systems can generate effortlessly and at scale, replacing the need for the physical troll farms like Internet Research Agency (made famous in the Mueller Report) with simple API calls and abundant processing power.

This is purely hypothetical at this moment, but I think the situation is not beyond reach.  Imagine a sophisticated cyber adversary performing coordinated account takeovers across social media platforms of several major influencers, akin to Cenat, and locking them out of accounts and recovery options by way of SIM swapping attacks and other techniques.  Now imagine the use of generative AI systems to impersonate messages from those influencers coordinated to sow chaos or violence on or before election day 2024.  It would be disastrous.  Only a coordinated government/private sector effort to halt such an attack would be effective.  Right now, that coordinated effort is not only not an option, but in fact illegal because of the decree of a single federal judge in Louisiana.

The Fifth Circuit is set to hear oral argument about whether this injunction stands in just a few days of writing this column.  If the Biden administration loses, this case will no doubt be before the U.S. Supreme Court.  Given recent decisions, together with the Court's composition and questionable ethics of late, I am deeply saddened to write that I have little faith that the Court would act in the best interest of the nation.  (Translation:  He's worried his little jewish One-Percenter's won't be able to hold on to power anymore.)

If this injunction against the government collaborating with social media platforms to combat harmful content stands - knowing what we know about election interference, the dangers of physical violence erupting from digital agent provocateurs, and the manipulation of social media sentiment by sophisticated cyber adversaries and hostile foreign powers - this is very much akin to stepping into a boxing match while having both hands tied behind one's back.  It's not going to end well.  We know that.  We've seen this before.  And yet, here we are again.  My bike messenger friend was right - "that was shit was crazy" - but I fear that by this time next year, shit could be exponentially crazier.



Note that World War 1, World War 2, the Vietnam War, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and a lot more wars were caused by both the media and government working together to spread lies to the general population in order to hold on to, or seize power.

"This is the horrible, untold truth about the First World War, which ruined an entire generation of European manhood.

The mass death of WW1 wasn't an accident, like you've been taught.  It wasn't the result of 19th century generals unfamiliar with what modern weapons would do.  The generals of the European empires weren't really that stupid.

WW1's death toll, where a million soldiers died in the first few months, was the result of a conscious decision by Europe's leaders to decimate and crush a younger generation that was getting too uppity and demanding in their desire for better living conditions amid an era of empire-building and globalization.

Watch out because WW3 will be the same thing.  The leaders of the world know that the younger generation's demands are incompatible with their own interests, and they will, accordingly, kill off a large portion of that generation in order to secure their position."

In the Name of Zion  (IMDb Entry)

Europa: The Last Battle

The Great War  The outbreak of World War 1 - from local conflict to World War in 1914.


Lead-Up to the Ukraine War

Here's a roughly-unbiased timeline of what happened.  It's important to understand that there was an actual, hot, modern war going on for years before the cameras moved in.  It's estimated that the forces involved each had more infantry than the entire British Army.

The "ethnic russians" being killed were, largely, people who'd taken up arms against their government, and civilians were mostly being killed unintentionally by both sides.

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=War_in_Donbas&oldid=1069444088

  
"Pay me or I'll send you to die for jewkraine" - Dyin' for Biden

Julian Assange Says Media Lies are Responsible for Most Wars in the Past 5 Decades


Traitors to the American People

BREAKING: James O'Keefe Exposes BlackRock Recruiter Bragging About Deciding People's Fate  Saying "war is good for business."

War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine's Agricultural Land

Private Sector on the Frontlines of Land Reform to Unlock Ukraine's Investment Potential

President Discussed With the CEO of (((BlackRock))) the Coordination of Efforts to Rebuild Ukraine

The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin  For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.

"When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."
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