245 Comments

>>>Because conservatives agree with Musk about the importance of making social media a welcoming place for transphobic jokes, they haven’t been nearly as quick to condemn him telling the Financial Times that Taiwan ought to become a Beijing-ruled Special Administrative Region. But when it comes to a random celebrity like John Cena, conservatives understand the basic dynamic perfectly well — money talks.<<<

Matt's being too polite here. Republicans are deeply unserious and/or profoundly duplicitous about China policy. Pretty much everything the GOP does on China is intended for domestic political audiences only. Strengthening America to compete in the new Cold War would mean things like:

*Addressing US demographic decline via immigration (Republicans want to do just the opposite, and push our growth levels down to PRC levels).

*Competing for the world's best and brightest to strengthen America's STEM sector (Republicans want to do just the opposite, and make it harder for talented foreigners to get work permits, green cards or student visas).

*Leading on Pacific Rim economic integration (Republicans have become the more protectionist of our two parties, and gave Obama essentially zero support on TPP, despite the obvious boost joining this group would have given to US efforts to contest the PRC's growing influence in this critical region).

*Bolstering US democratic norms (something cold warriors in the 1950s and 1960s understood: a nontrivial degree of support for the Civil Rights movement was generated by the need to compete for global hearts and minds, and to demonstrate the superiority of liberal democracy over totalitarianism). Republicans won't even disavow insurrectionists.

*Readying the country for its next, inevitable rendez-vous with a pandemic. (Republicans have mostly gone full anti-vax nutter).

I could also cite climate change, infrastructure and various other areas where the US should play a leading role and/or demonstrate robust state capacity. The PRC is a formidable adversary: surely a lot tougher opponent that the USSR ever was. Republicans aren't serious about any of it, though admittedly they do a bang up job hurling racist invective (Kung Flu, etc) on Twitter, so at least there's that!

Expand full comment

This, but one caveat: you’re missing the other potential explanation beyond duplicity…

Which is that education polarization has so stripped the GOP of bright, mid-level staffers of the sort who typically flesh out think tanks and determine the nuts and bolts of what policy X should look like that they have no idea how to act on any anti-China rhetorical points which are held in good faith.

Expand full comment

It's possible that there's some of that. But (call me cynical if you like, but this is actually how I see it) I think there are plenty of very, very smart right wingers out there who know perfectly well that actually maximizing the country's position vis-a-vis the PRC would mean doing some things likely to ruffle the feathers of both their MAGA footsoldiers AND a few of their elites (I'm thinking of the Stephen Miller set).

But they're infinitely more concerned with winning the next election than they are about seeing the United States of America prevail in its competition with the CCP/PRC.

(A particularly egregious example of GOP awfulness on this score involved Ted Cruz. He's very far indeed from being a stupid man. But he's beyond Nixonian in his craven cynicism. You may recall someone floated the concept—there may even have been a bill before a committee though I don't recall the specifics—of greenlighting large-scale Taiwanese immigration in the wake of an invasion. Cruz, of course, shot it down, citing a nonspecific national security risk).

Expand full comment

Honestly there's probably going to come a day, assuming that Xi isn't a complete idiot and so wedded to his statism that he just pushes China over the cliff entirely, when the Democrats can use "weak on China" as a line of attack at least as effective as the GOP "Weak on the USSR" was in the 1950's.

The GOP is pretty singularly spineless on the issue, and now that the mainstream Democrats have gotten over their fear of being called racist by the ultra-woke/tankie left, they have the institutional capabilities to make good targeted policy.

Expand full comment

That immigration of talented workers, lower deficits, taxation of net CO2 emissions, and freer trade promote growth is not rocket science. Cognitive challenges are not a good explanation.

Expand full comment

Which of those do you think are election winners?

Expand full comment

That's a Republican platform I'd be very attracted to unless the lower deficits were achieved mainly by reducing downward income transfers.

Expand full comment

Sure — but would voters? I doubt it.

Expand full comment

OK, but still the point is that the reason is not lack of lower level staff to flesh out the positions.

Expand full comment

Well said, but I would add to that that there is no through-line for any Republican/conservative critique/policy direction. Their strongest motivator is to win the day's propaganda battle and score debating points against the despised liberals. They would be very happy to excoriate Biden for being weak on protecting Taiwan if that won them the day's points, but then drop Taiwan support like a hot potato once they take power.

Expand full comment

For a long time I thought that their only real interest was reducing taxes on the rich. I now think some of their positions on social issues (they look at immigration just as a social issue, not as a growth inhibiting economic issue) and maybe (hopefully not) trade restrictions are also sincere, provided addressing them do not require higher taxes on the rich.

Expand full comment
founding

To be fair, this is common across the political spectrum, from “Bernie would have won” and whatever the woke flavor of the minute is through the Bill Maher center as well as the Republican brand.

Expand full comment

True. Trump could come out tomorrow morning advocating that China annex the US and his followers would lap it up. (Indeed, he was singing Xi's praises recently for having such a firm grip—an iron fist was the phrase in question—on the lives of 1.4 billion human beings):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/06/trump-authoritarians-republicans-iron-fist/

Expand full comment

It feels like you're being too uncharitable here. I agree with you that Republicans are not prioritizing competition with China at a level that would justify their rhetoric. But I think you can make a similar argument about Democrats, who I think have made similarly unserious choices if China is truly *the* major threat to US interests (if not quite as many unserious choices). Specifically, I am thinking of the many complaints by European and East Asian partner nations regarding the trade policies at the heart of the Biden team's foreign policy and the "Made in America" requirements of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. A conservative could also argue that Democrats are encouraging cultural balkanization in their social policies, which is the last thing a country needs of it's preparing for conflict with a major foreign threat (as a liberal, I don't think this argument is particularly fair either, but there's a kernel of truth here. Democrats certainly aren't prioritizing policies that would lead to greater cultural integration or reconciliation with Republicans).

Expand full comment

In the comment you're responding to, I wasn't accusing the GOP of not taking the country's national security seriously (although they don't). Rather, I was accusing them of being hypocritical. Anti-China hawkery has become perhaps that party's mostly deeply held, core principle, in a way that is most definitely *not* the case with the Democratic Party.

That said, Biden has absolutely bludgeoned China's chip sector with his most recent executive order, and Democrats in general support ideas and policies that actually would strengthen—not weaken—the country in its struggle with the PRC.

Expand full comment

I’d rather not fight a second cold war. Losing a cold war is catastrophic, and winning won hardly made the US better off in material terms. Indeed, the fallout of the first cold war still has a fair chance of leading to nuclear strikes.

Expand full comment

Me neither, but, at least for the time being, that ship has already sailed.

Expand full comment

I think you would agree that "I would simply not engage in warfare" is not a very serious position.

Expand full comment

The other side has... something of a say... in these matters, lol.

Expand full comment

My position is “I would engage in warfare to the extent Canada has since 1945.”

Expand full comment

I’m totally ok nudging Taiwan towards the PRC. The Chinese government has its warts, but it’s not obviously worse than, say, the government of the Philippines or Brazil, and it is orders of magnitude harder to confront

Expand full comment
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022

>The Chinese government has its warts, but it’s not obviously worse than, say, the government of the Philippines or Brazil

This is just completely not true on a variety of metrics. If you care about personal liberties at all, China is orders of magnitude worse than either of these two. If you're a minority in China, you have no path for any form of political representation. China also allows no competing political parties that could challenge the CCP, there is no avenue for political change outside the state regime. Brazil is a fairly robust, multi-party democracy and while the Philippines is a bit of a basket case, it does have elections and opposition parties do have some say in their political system.

Both the Philippines and Brazil consistently support freedom of religion, academic freedom, and freedom of movement. Brazil has constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression (The Philippines has restrictions on media but individuals retain pretty broad latitude in what they can say in public on social media). China is a country that (still! even as they're trying to raise birth rates) explicitly restricts the reproductive freedom of most of their population and is actively committing reproductive genocide on their citizens in Xinjiang. Like, this is night and day, foundational stuff. And that totally discounts the fact that Taiwan is *better* than both Brazil and the Philippines on all those metrics. Encouraging Taiwan to just accept the loss of these freedoms is, to my eye, moral bankruptcy on par with Nixon and Kissinger's tacit acceptance of Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh.

Expand full comment

In the Philippines and Brazil, there are state adjacent hit squads that run around killing different types of undesirables. The plight of the Uighurs is different, but they are leas than 1% of Cinha’s population and even the US imprisons a bunch of black men.

Expand full comment

I am happy to concede that The Philippines, Brazil, China, and even the US are all imperfect countries whose governments, in some shape or another, restrict or oppress their citizens. But what matters is the entire scope, not the mere presence of illiberalism in each. And China is demonstrably much worse than every other country mentioned on nearly every metric. To ignore that is crass whataboutery. Feel free to look through the Freedom House reports on all of them sometime if you don't want to take my word for it (and please note that Taiwan is one of the most free countries on the planet by their standards) https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map

Expand full comment

I think it would terrible for America to in any way pressure Taiwan into an annexation deal with the totalitarian across the Strait. Is that what you mean by "nudge"?

Relatedly, though, I think it would be madness for the US to get into a shooting war with the PRC over that island's status. If we're going to "nudge" them, said nudges should concentrate on getting them to spend a lot more on their military. It would make everybody's life easier (except Xi's) if the PLA knew an invasion were overwhelmingly likely to result in defeat. Alas, Taipei spends about a 1/3 of what Israel does on defense.

Expand full comment

Perhaps the first thing we should do is mothball most of our aircraft carriers. The idea that the US can project power even where allies can’t provide secure bases is dangerous.

If China attacked Taiwan, we should do no more for the Taiwanese than we have for Ukraine

Expand full comment

You are being even more flagrantly unserious than usual.

Expand full comment

Are Canada, Italy and Germany not serious countries?

Expand full comment

Was Haoan better off when it had the largest carrier fleet in the world (which it constructed during its occupation of China!) than it is now? Did the extra muscle carriers offered Emperor Hirohito in responding to the US oil embargo redound to Japan’s benefit? Or did carriers create the illusion Japan could humble a county with twice its population and keep on building its foreign policy castles in the sky?

Expand full comment

Agreed, with the proviso that aircraft carriers are still useful for intimidating shit countries like Iran. But China, with its ninety zillion surface to ship missiles and drones? Not so much.

Expand full comment

Sorry, are you suggesting that if the US in 1945 had returned to its pre-1940 isolationism that the US would have been better off in 2022?

Communism was a hostile expanding totalizing ideology with the potential & capacity to knock over country after country, picking up momentum as it went. If the US had sat on its hands and whistled as Communism expanded, we would have had a Cold War starting in the 1970s after the Soviets had finished adding France+Italy+Spain to the Warsaw pact, installed a Communist government in Indonesia, and started securing multiple footholds in Latin America (not just Cuba but also Chile / Nicaragua / Peru, in all likelihood).

Expand full comment

Yes, David actually, genuinely believes that the US would have been or will be just fine as a continental autarky after allowing any of Germany/Japan, the USSR, or China to dominate Eurasia under illiberal and oft-genocidal governments.

So you're not going to get a sane answer to that question.

Expand full comment

Wild. Thanks for saving me a conversation!

Expand full comment

what exactly did we need to import from western europe in 1945?

Expand full comment

This is so profoundly flawed as a framework for understanding this issue that it is clearly asked in bad faith, so I’m going to leave you to go imbibe some more Michael Tracey shitposting in peace.

Expand full comment

Mind your manners. The U.S. had practically no realpolitik interest in propping up Western Europe. It was Cade of mission creep. We were politically compelled to do it to honor the sacrifice of US soldiers in defeating Germany. If only Hitler hadn’t declared war on the U.S., Germany and the USSR could have fought to exhaustion. Britain might still be an imperial power if it hasn’t insisted on protecting Poland when it lacked the military ability to do so

Expand full comment
deletedOct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I strongly disagree. The Vietnam War went from 1946-1975. If the French had packed up and left at the first sign of Vietnamese Communists, then the wave of un-obstructed Communist expansion would have hit surrounding nations 30 years earlier & during the time when the Soviets and CCP were working together.

In our timeline, there were over a million Communist members and sympathizers in Indonesia by 1965 [before the purges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366], and India experienced repeated Naxalite uprisings starting in 1967 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite%E2%80%93Maoist_insurgency]. There was clearly scope for Communism to spread further than it did in Southern and Southeast Asia if it hadn't been stalled in Vietnam for 30 years, especially since the 1917-1949 period saw rapid Communist expansion in Eurasia on multiple fronts.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Yes, and that death toll is smaller than the expected death toll of communism taking over Indonesia, let alone also taking over India.

In addition to millions dying in "third-world backwaters", a more expansive communism would eventually have caused problems for rich-world countries, if it was actively expanded towards them and had ideological momentum thanks to fresh revolutions. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not guaranteed.

Expand full comment

correct. it’s not as if every communist regime became a stalinist hellhole. vietnam today is probably a better place than myanmar, i’d certainly rather play the natural lottery in todays vietnam than haiti

Expand full comment

~40 million people died in Europe alone for WW2. Perhaps only 10 million die if we don't fight Hitler. Do you think that was worth it?

Expand full comment

Depends on strategy. Trying to outgrow China and helping the resto f the world to do so, too would be a great Cold War strategy. [It wouldn't have anything in particular to do with total trade with China even.] It worked with the Soviet Union, but their economic policies were much worse so it didn't take much to best them. China is a more serious competitor.

And even if we are not successful, we're still better off.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Even aid enthusiast I cannot say that our "out grow" competition with China should be mainly about poorer countries, but they certainly should benefit.

In addition as a rich country and as one that has contribute a lot to the excess CO2 in the atmosphere, we (though not we alone) should provide aid to poorer countries to undertake mitigation of CO2 effects and damages thereof (e.g. the foods/drought in the Indian Subcontinent). How and how much requires more thought. I guess we have some obligation to help poor countries offset the deadweight loss of their own taxes on net CO2 emissions, but these will be hard to observe and I suspect pretty low.

Expand full comment

I mean I don't know the causality here but the 90's were freaking great as far as US prosperity went.

Expand full comment

For one, as I note elsewhere, other people have a say in whether that conflict occurs, lol. The USSR had, and China has, no concept of a fundamentally peaceful coexistence. For all their bluff and bluster, neither the CPSU nor the CCP is confident "Socialism" actually is the future, and the CCP will be happy to push the US and EU into economic satrapy and social division in order to make *certain* that is true.

For another, basically all the fundamental underpinnings of American prosperity and its reasonably flat allocation among the citizenry were the offspring of the Second World War and Cold War. Along with the Civil Rights Movement's success, which was in a very real sense due to the realization among most of the elite that we needed to live up to our rhetoric, at least at home.

Expand full comment

China has always been pretty inward looking and has never expanded much beyond its periphery, unlike European powers from Portugal to France to Britain, which gobbled up vast swathes of territory

Expand full comment

Please, continue to misunderstand the entire historical arc of the last 1200 years. It really advances your arguments.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

China has had recurrent warfare with almost all of its neighbors since WW2. It invaded South Korea, fought multiple large battles with the Soviet Union, fought a small war with India and a larger one with Vietnam, was intimately involved with supporting the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and its proxies in Laos, and is supplying troops and expertise to Myanmar. It's also threatened all its maritime neighbors and refuses to recognize Japan's sea borders. It takes real effort to have disputes with all your neighbors except North Korea.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I deleted the last comment because there's just no point, but to recap:

Tell me how you know *nothing* about the politics, policy, global influence work, or foreign relations of the CCP without telling me you know nothing about them.

Goodbye, Henry.

Expand full comment

Is it serious to not acknowledge obvious truths in the name of social justice? What is the truth about the vaccines? It does seem like they significantly reduce the risk of bad outcomes for an individual. What do they do to limit transmission? Not much. I am vaccinated. Fauci is out there now denying his role from a lot of the policies pursued during COVID, particularly with schools.

You’re right Republicans are crazy. But Dems are also non-serious, science denying, culture warring nutters too. Just a little less.

Expand full comment

What evidence has led you to believe they do "not much" to limit transmission? That differs from my understanding, which is that reducing infection severity is a mechanism by which they do limit transmission, since it lowers viral load and thus ability to transmit.

But it's hard to keep up with the ever-shifting body of research and I'm no expert, so if you have seen compelling evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested to see it

Expand full comment

You’re right it is hard to keep up. My understanding is that with variants the protection of getting the virus has diminished significantly. The protection against getting the virus also diminished significantly with time, even with no variants. These two things together seem to explain so many vaccinated getting the virus.

Expand full comment
founding

When the original variant was still present, and vaccinated people all had fresh vaccines, infections among vaccinated people were about 95% lower than among unvaccinated people. After the alpha variant, and the delta variant, and the omicron variant, and after vaccinated people mostly let their vaccines go stale without a booster (classic or updated), vaccinated people still have a 60% lower risk of infection than unvaccinated people. (I think there was one week at the tail end of omicron when vaccinated people were only 30% less likely to be infected than unvaccinated people in the same age range, because the unvaccinated people were mostly recently infected.)

I believe this page has the CDC data on infection by vaccination status up until this week, but it looks like they will stop tracking it next week:

https://data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccination-and-Case-Trends-by-Age-Group-/gxj9-t96f

Expand full comment

Oh and it is true that I don’t have a peer reviewed scientific paper that supports the theory that the vaccines aren’t doing much to reduce transmission.

Expand full comment

The list fails to include deficit financed tax cuts as profoundly anti growth.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

You do raise another hobbyhorse of mine: the tendency of our anti-China policy (both political parties are guilty in this case) to basically not even *attempt* to woo the Chinese people, and/or differentiate between them and their government/party.

We should be trying to make it as difficult as possible for Beijing to implement or promote anti-USA policies and rhetoric by tapping into the still quite large reservoir of goodwill toward America that's very apparent in the Middle Kingdom. Make Xi's task more difficult, not easier.

But we seem intent on doing the latter by doing our utmost to play the bitter, remorseless, uber-enemy of China 24/7.

Expand full comment

Very effective stab at sane-washing Henry, lol.

Expand full comment

Please say more about the "large reservoir of goodwill toward America." I'd very much like to believe it and I profess total ignorance about the Chinese people. But it strikes me that there is intense nationalism in Chinese views of the world and that can often be very strongly triggered. (I'm thinking, e.g., of the accidental (?) US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.)

Expand full comment

You should believe it. It's true. They watch our TV (often with use of VPNs), wear our sneakers, drive our cars (Buicks, Jeeps, Teslas, Cadillacs), text and browse the web our our phones, drink our coffee, worship our tycoons (Buffetts, Jobs, Musk, Gates, etc), wear our baseball caps (Yankees caps are everywhere), listen to our music, watch our basketball games, eat our crap fast food and dream of going to our universities. For starters. They're well aware we have the ability to fire our leaders. They're well aware our vaccines work. They're well aware we're no long in lockdown nor are we obliged to wear masks.

No time for a long comment, and I'm not suggesting some of the dysfunction on display in the US recently hasn't hurt our image. But yeah, I stand by my contention about the good will. Also, remember, there are several million residents of the US who were born in China, so there are family ties as well...

Expand full comment

I would add that my professional sphere (academic science) attracts a disproportionate share of Chinese expats, many/most of whom (including friends, mentors, colleagues and former students) start out thinking that they will attend a Western university, learn some science and then pursue a career back in China. But once they experience a free society up-close, the good will often goes way past baseball caps and Big Macs. So many decided to stay and seek residence/citizenship (in the US or a European country) that the Chinese Academy more-or-less has to bribe them (with ridiculous research budgets, etc.) to return. And yet I often get an ear full about how difficult it is to conduct research in a totalitarian society (my words) from very successful professors in China.

I have seen many young Chinese scientists struggle with the dissonance of what they believed growing up versus what they see from the outside—and they talk with the friends and family back home. Even the ones who do decide to return to China take back with them an obvious fondness for the West and personal connections to people from all over the world. I have to assume the same happens in all of the areas in which China deliberately sends people out to learn/copy from Western companies, etc. (Maybe I'm actually making the argument that soft power is still a thing.)

Expand full comment

Very illuminating. Thanks.

Expand full comment

The nationalism you see is unrepresentative in two ways, first in that it's the Chinese equivalent of the ultra-online right and tankie left talking, and second in that it's filtered first through the selectively blind lens of domestic censorship and propagandizing and then through the very fuzzy lens of *terrible* Western media coverage. The Weibo and Global Times quotes we see here are the equivalent of Twitter hot takes.

The average Chinese person is, from what I can tell, deeply, deeply skeptical of the American government, but also very aware, due to family and commercial ties, that the American government is vastly less all-encompassing than their own and that America's political and social structures have afforded many Chinese emigrants a very good life indeed.

Expand full comment

The Chinese government pushes Chinese nationalism very hard precisely because they understand the US is a real beacon to Chinese people. We are rich, welcoming, allow people to practice their religion openly, don't legislate how many children they should have, and have relatively low levels of corruption. We also have a lot of very successful Chinese-Americans with real social and political capital in a democracy. To the extent we promote people-to-people contacts with Chinese people and argue our beef is only with the CCP, we can make real headway.

Expand full comment

We could make headway except on the Taiwan issue. From what I can tell the Chinese to a man/woman strongly feel that island is their country's territory. That's my strong impression based on not just knowing a lot of Chinese people, but also knowing a fair number who are highly skeptical of the Party's rule and want their country to become a democracy.

Expand full comment

How do these people feel about Mongolia or Vladivostok or Sikkim? Do they also consider those places to be their country's territory? How about Singapore or Malaysia?

Expand full comment

This implies that you'd need a Chinese person to have a "large reservoir of goodwill toward America" before you'd consider using honey and not vinegar, thus highlighting the very selective racism being highlighted.

Even if Chinese people were chock full of badwill toward America or the West, so what? Why should that change anything? That is not the standard liberal line when it comes to other non-white peoples, which is that the West must accommodate them, that any animosity that they as individuals might feel toward the West is the fault of the West. Perhaps elevating ethnic Chinese within America would be the best soft power weapon one could have ("our Chinese have it so much better than your Chinese!"), but of course neither side is interested in doing that. Conservatives for obvious reasons, but also liberals - from looking at the Substacks you subscribe to (Krugman, DeLong, etc.), you're one. We have some other poster down here, raging against the GOP but also ranting about 1200 years (?) of unique violence by China (thus giving lie to any claim that their animosity toward the Chinese people is limited to the Cee Cee Pee), as if the history of white Europeans wasn't many times worse.

Another thought. Any geopolitical or technological struggle with China will require increased buy-in from the Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese. What are the odds that America, and American society, will use honey and not vinegar toward those countries, and people of those ethnic descent here in America? It all depends on which kind of liberal wins out in the culture here, because it's certainly not going to come from the type who suddenly became a foreign policy hawk in the 2010's for totally non-racial reasons.

Expand full comment

The obvious answer is “the standard line when it comes to non-white people” (which is no such thing, of course, that’s a very narrowly-held view) is wrong.

The West stumbled ass-backwards into the package of technologies that let it project power further from home and held a near-monopoly thereupon for a crucial period of time.

But “imperialism” is a near-universal constant for powerful states throughout history, constrained only by material limitations.

There is no moral superiority in doing the same things in a less effective, sophisticated, or wide-ranging manner.

Ours is the first era in which there are meaningful moral constraints on the behavior of nation-states. Finally.

Expand full comment

"If Muslims are anti-West, we must step up our treatment of Muslims in the West to show that Our Way is Better", for instance, is hardly a narrowly-held view. It is the default view of all institutions and Western liberals. If the race-swapped corollary is not one of the first things that pop in a Democrat's head when thinking of How to Deal with China, perhaps they should consider what underlying racism prevents it from being so.

This isn't to say that Chinese as a group face more racism than Muslims as a group. Different groups face different kinds of racism more or less than others, and there's particular kinds that Chinese and East Asians are particularly more likely to face.

And everyone is consistent when put on the spot or challenged. And yet obvious double standards in how center-to-left Westerners, who in the American context I'm just calling Democrats, see and treat different non-white groups persist. So obviously someone, a great many someones, are lying. Your "obvious answer" is not obvious in practice to the centrist-leaning liberals for whom you are speaking.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Well, yes, that's a fair point. Take Saudi Arabia for example. A brutal dictatorship that kills Washington Post journalists by luring them into its consulates. Biden was fist-bumping their dictator a few months ago.

Contrast that with the attitude of US elites toward China. You wouldn't have to have gone full Greenwaldian to suspect that maybe, just maybe, it's not China's non democratic governmental norms that have got DC riled up; it's about the fact that the Chinese have a $30 trillion economy, a giant defense budget, and a rapidly growing nuclear arsenal...

But as it happens, I suspect ant-China animus would take different forms were the mainland to democratize, and I think a full-blown Cold War wouldn't be possible to sustain in the US, politically. But we'd probably continue to experience a lot of trade friction, just like back in the 70s and 80s vis-a-vis Japan.

Expand full comment

Matt overrates the cultural importance of Twitter. It has a tenth as many users as FB. The vast majority of users get a really shitty experience: tweeting is about as likely to engage others as sitting alone and screaming at your TV. Twitter has become a forum for elites to spar with each other in public view and that’s not nothing, but it isn’t so different from dueling press releases or cable news appearances, and it could all be transferred to FB pretty easily. Bottom line, Twitter is much less integrated into normal peoples’ lives than FB or Instagram and there isn’t an obvious path for it to broadly engage normal people.

Expand full comment

But it is more heavily used by -important- people like journalists and Very Online lefties.

Expand full comment

Journalists matter, but why do Very Online Lefties?

Expand full comment

Because journalists listen to Very Online Lefties.

Expand full comment

Because it appears that over the last decade VOLs have obtained a small-but-still-greater-than-the-historical-mean degree of influence over institutions and businesses via the vector of social media?

Expand full comment
founding

A lot of people across the political spectrum seem to believe that the most important things today are the Very Online Lefties who must be stopped from getting even more power and social significance.

Expand full comment

"Matt overrates the cultural importance of Twitter."

I don't know about *cultural* importance, but it's the main news channel for Iran dissidents to disseminate news of their protests. And it's the main way that I keep up with developments in Ukraine. Twitter has been instrumental in getting voices, videos, updates of all kind out of Iran and Ukraine and into the wider world.

And by following Ukrainian Twitter, I have also been exposed to a lot more info about the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and Finland than I would have been.

Russian Twitter is also very busy -- the Ministry for Foreign Affairs is on Twitter a lot, as are Russian hawks and mil-bloggers spouting their nonsense.

People in these countries are using Twitter for many things that have nothing to do with the American very-on-line left.

Expand full comment

To the extent Twitter has this influence, it is because it is heavily used by journalists, who then write articles about it.

But given that it is pretty echo chamber-y, I'd say it is (on net) a bad thing for many/most journalists to engage in it

Expand full comment

I agree Twitter influence is a bad thing. Journalists love twitter and cable news. But only old people watch cable news and twitter's active user count is extremely small compared to most other large social media sites.

The world would be better if journalists didn't myopically focus on both. And while I hate cable news I love twitter.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Expand full comment

Twitter spreads the Telegram content even farther.

Expand full comment

Twitter partly functions as a telegram aggregator, which is especially useful since a lot of the relevant material is in languages I don't understand.

Expand full comment

Nah, FB could never replace twitter. It's not nearly as good at fencing off elite discourse because it relies on people formally associating themselves with groups rather than communities and contexts forming around distributed follower networks. On twitter Grimes can associate with niche political subcommunities (as a random example) without hordes of randos waltzing in and destroying any semblance of intelligent conversation, which is what happens on FB nearly 100% of the time.

Expand full comment

"It has a tenth as many users as FB." - I mean, but how often are those using logging in and engaging? They also seem to be utilizing different social media angles. Facebook seems to still be where you share photos of family/friends, post status updates, join community groups. Twitter has a lot more active political engagement - Trump wasn't using Facebook to get out messages while he was POTUS, and neither does someone like Elon Musk.

tl;dr Twitter seems far more important to influential people who want a big platform than FB.

Expand full comment
founding

The key value to be exploited with Twitter is you have a ton of individuals running their own businesses, as well as giant conglomerates, who have outsourced all sorts of previously in-sourced coverage decisions to Twitter and would likely pay good money to at the very least retain access rather than go back to the good ole days....and it seems Twitter has done very little to monetize those people to the fullest extent.

That said, the only reason Twitter has all that power is that tons of Media organizations have decided collectively to bestow that coverage decision filtering upon Twitter....they could stop tomorrow if they wanted to (and people like me think that would be a good thing for society...even if it's bad for Media companies).

Expand full comment
Oct 18, 2022·edited Oct 18, 2022

It does seem unique in that you can find news in real time. For example, if I see there are a ton of fire trucks at a DC metro station with huge crowds of people, I can search on Twitter for what's happening and probably find someone else tweeting about it. I can't do that on Facebook or LinkedIn. Instagram (and I assume TikTok) has a search but people are less likely to be using photo/video sharing that way.

I took a photo of flooding at a Metro stop and posted it on Twitter so other people could see. A newspaper saw it pretty instantly because I used relevant hashtags/words and asked me if they could use it in their story - I don't think that's as likely to happen if I post on FB, LinkedIn, Instagram.

Expand full comment
founding

The key value Twitter has over all the other platforms is that there is a default assumption that if something important is going on in the world, and you want other random people to know, you go to Twitter to talk about it. If you go to Facebook, you only want your friends and family to know. You can go to Instagram or Stories, but that’s ephemeral and wont last.

This alone will be hard to replicate, especially given the institutional cement of Media organizations, non-profits, think tanks, etc all centralizing their influence operations over the platform. Does that mean it’s impossible? No...but just very very difficult given Aggregation effects.

Last note, let’s not forget how upset all the same folks were with Spotify over Joe Rogan...and just how long it took Crosby Stills and Nash (and tons of other artists) to quietly put their music back on the platform and move onto the next (dare i say, current?) thing...

Expand full comment
founding

Forgot i made this post about monetizing the power users (ie. media influencers), guess i was more prophetic than most having a laugh at Musk going on about how he would make speech free-er...

Expand full comment
founding

the vast majority of users don't even tweet or reply...they just lurk. So now sure how "shitty" the experience can be...like most things, a very vocal minority of power users have a rather atypical user experience.

Expand full comment

When the reply button is right there, why not use it? I love trying to engage the newsmakers, but they don’t play with me and it hurts my feelings

Expand full comment

"Foreign dictatorships are bad" is a really underrated normie take. It seems like a lot of commentators on foreign affairs believe either a) "foreign dictatorships can't be blamed for their actions because everything is the fault of those countries who did colonialism from 1492-1965", or b) the vaguely Burkean "every country gets the government the people want regardless of whether they got to vote for it, so the Chinese government has just as much of a popular mandate as the American one". (You see this second one from both racists who want to use the Chinese government's atrocities to attack Chinese culture and weird right-wing edgelords who oppose democracy in general.)

Call me naïve, but personally I think legitimacy only derives from consent of the governed (and failure to topple the government in a revolution does not count as consent), and it makes a moral difference whether a government came to power through a free and fair election or not.

Expand full comment

I hope very much that this is still a boring normie take...

Expand full comment
founding

"Because conservatives agree with Musk about the importance of making social media a welcoming place for transphobic jokes..."

I guess it is good to have an occasional reminder of what Matt thinks about conservatives, even if some of us appreciate his writings. To reduce criticism of Twitter's moderation practices to wanting to make transphobic jokes is insulting.

Expand full comment

Isn’t this basically true though? A lot of the blowback from conservatives on twitter is that it’s essentially enforcing a type of internet manners that means you can’t own the libs as hard with mean language. You can still make lots of smart takedowns of leftist policy but you then can’t finish it by saying something about shooting a bunch of liberals.

I guess I’d be more sympathetic if there was more evidence of the thoughtful stuff being policed vs the weird mean stuff.

As someone who thinks the internet is rude and cruel enough already (and as the parent of a young child), I’m generally okay with manners moderation and I’m okay with it applying equally across the political or religious spectrum.

Expand full comment

I referenced this in a comment below, but the majority of Twitter suspensions aren't for harassment. They are for article sharing and possibly just partisan affiliation.

https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5

Expand full comment

I’m going to be blunt: quit whining like my 4 year old.

Matt’s using “conservatives” as a shorthand for the mainstream “conservative” party, which you and I both know is no such thing.

The GOP stands in opposition to almost everything in which genuine conservatives believe.

It wraps itself ostentatiously in the flag to avoid having to grapple with any real, genuine patriotism of the sort which might require it to give a damn about the well-being of the country.

It speaks endlessly of the value of the nation-state while quietly facilitating the rent-seeking and corruption of multinational business interests and undermining the rule of law at home and abroad.

It waxes poetically about free markets while systemically working to tilt the playing field in favor of those who already have the wealth to play the game.

It talks about the danger of authoritarianism abroad while making common cause with rabid authoritarians at home and doing the bidding of those businesses which have no interest in standing up to the likes of the CCP.

I could go on, and on, but you get the point. Our liberal party sucks, in large part because it’s in coalition with an anti-liberal “left” now dominated by professional class people with no material concerns. But the GOP is damned near irredeemable at this point.

If the US survives the 21st century as the world’s premier power and a liberal democracy, it will be in spite of GOP efforts to drive it off the cliff at nearly every turn.

Expand full comment
founding

Your riff is entertaining, even if misdirected. My comment was about the gratuitous and mildly-insulting part of Matt's essay. It was not a defense of the GOP at all.

Expand full comment

My core point was, and you know this because Matt has routinely used this shorthand, that "conservatives" here means "GOP voters".

To the extent that there is an unfairness here, it's that the two are clearly no longer the same thing.

But that shorthand has been around for half a century at this point, so I think that particular windmill is a bit too large for your horse and lance.

Expand full comment

Is it really that clear that they're not the same thing? Sometimes, this reminds me of "you can't refer to Actually Existing Communism to critique Communists". There something to be said for a descriptivist approach.

There are ways to define the term (such as focusing on power/hierarchical relationships) that show continuity/connection between intellectual conservatives and the GOP. Matt himself did that here --

https://www.slowboring.com/p/chemtrails-over-the-country-club

Expand full comment

You don't get to claim the "No True Scotsman" defense here. Either true conservatives and never-Trumpers have nothing to do with the GOP and its elites, in which case they are not important in politics and can be ignored, or they are associated with the GOP and its elites and do believe in "owning the left". You have to choose purity or lying down with the dogs and waking up with fleas. You can't straddle the fence on this.

Expand full comment
founding

Sure I can. Just like you can choose to not be associated with the crazies on the left. I don't think the behavior of the recent oil protesters -- defacing art, blocking roadways, etc -- is a fair characterization of the environmental movement, as but one example.

There is a difference, in my view, between hippie-punching (which is fine to demonstrate one's bonafides when appealing to normies) and mis-characterizing opponents to score cheap points. In my view, Matt did the latter when describing conservatives writ large who have concerns about social media moderation practices as wanting to make "social media a welcoming place for transphobic jokes"

Expand full comment

Why should I care about the hurt feelings of a small unrepresentative minority that believes in "hippie-punching" but won't join a coalition if its feelings are hurt? It takes two to tango here. If yo want to join the coalition and insist people's feeling must be respected, then you don't get to hippie-punch and make innumerable snide comments about your fellow members of the coalition.

Expand full comment

anyone can hippie lunch and advocate for his feelings if he gets enough power. democrats depend on the cites of people like john. without them, biden would have lost.

Expand full comment

"Our liberal party sucks, in large part because it’s in coalition with an anti-liberal “left” now dominated by professional class people with no material concerns. But the GOP is damned near irredeemable at this point."

I think your observations here are entirely correct....and profoundly depressing....if these 2 parties are our only real choices. WTF are we to do?

Expand full comment

The liberals seem to be slowly gaining the balls to fuck over the leftists. Let's see if that lets them effectively reclaim the mushy middle and build a coalition that can actually hold and exercise power as the Democrats did 1932-1994.

The GOP is reverting to form on, ya know, the basic duties a state has to its people (none, by their lights, lest the rich be a hair less rich than they would), which I did not expect this time last year.

So I expect that if the Democrats can loudly and ostentatiously marginalize the ultra-tribal/woke/hipster politics voices on their left flank, they'll be able to win power even with rampant gerrymandering and structural imbalances in the Senate.

Expand full comment

democrats can’t win an election without woke peoples’ votes.

Expand full comment

The leader of your movement told Jews to "get their act together...before it's too late" and deliberately misspelled your Minority Leader's wife's name in a racist way over the weekend. One of your Senators (Tuberville) said black people are criminals. I've avoided the trans dogfights on social media so maybe this specific charge is unfair, but if your movement has gained a reputation for cruelty to minorities, I'd look inside as to the reason before blaming outsiders.

Expand full comment
founding

There was a time when "conservative" and "Republican" were synonymous. That is definitely not the case today.

Expand full comment

You'll forgive those of us outside the movement for focusing on those who hold power within the movement and hold or are seeking office than to private citizens.

Expand full comment

Ok, then tell me what political or social power "conservatives" have then? Why should I care what they think (in a political sense as opposed to an intellectual sense) if they have no influence? Go after the GOP for naming their conference CPAC.

Expand full comment

Which one flocks to Twitter clones like Gab and Truth Social to make transphobic jokes? That's the group Matt was referring to.

I'm not being glib; what is a succinct word to describe the group of self-styled Conservative Republicans whose main complaint about Twitter is that they can't make overtly racist / antisemitic comments, threaten groups of people with violence and spread baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud. MAGA? Trump Voters? Christian Nationalists?

I used to think of myself as a progressive, but then woke lunatics decided that they were progressive, so that's no longer me.

Hate-filled cultists may have irreversibly claimed "conservative" and "Republican" as their own.

Expand full comment

Maybe not, but it's still quite common to use them as synonyms and to deliberately overlook that and not take a charitable view of what someone means isn't a good look.

Expand full comment

Hard agree. According to the House GOP judiciary account, they care about Trump, Elon, and Kanye. To leave out anti semitism and fomenting violent insurrection against the US government misses more than half of their Twitter policy platform! Oh, and shadow banning (aka the Havana syndrome of the web) and spreading of the good news of ivermectin!! How can Matt leave out so many essential pillars of GOP tech social media policy?

Shoot, almost forgot cancel culture - that’s also an important and real thing!

Expand full comment

What is the core beef conservatives have with Twitter's moderation practices? Genuine quesiton.

Expand full comment
founding

I am not all that fired up about it, to be honest. However, the suppression of the NYPost leading up to the 2018 election, including banning their account for a factually true story, ranks high on the list.

https://nypost.com/2018/08/04/how-twitter-is-fueling-the-democratic-agenda/

Expand full comment

Can't y'all just boycott Twitter? Stop using it. Close your accounts. The Pillow Guy and Chick-fil-A can stop advertising on it. And so on.

Expand full comment

This is true. But Twitter does matter given its indirect influence. Journalists are heavily influenced by the app and it does impact coverage. So it is fair for conservatives to be concerned about Twitter.

A lot of liberals focus on Fox even though no one forces them to watch.

Expand full comment

Their vague and sometimes inaccurate enforcment of their terms of service policies. Conservative people and groups seem to get "accidentally" locked out of their accounts or locked out with no explanation much more than progressives.

Expand full comment

This sort of thing is way too easy to trick yourself on. Give it no weight until you can see actual statistics.

Expand full comment

Here are some statistics. The paper has not been published in a journal yet and has not yet been reviewed, but it is all can I find:

https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5

The big takeaway is, according to these researchers, conservative Twitter accounts are suspended a lot more than progressive accounts and suspensions are a lot more correlated with partisan leanings and article sharing than they are with harassment.

Expand full comment

Now, did you form your seemingly-strongly-held opinion *after* reading that or before??

Expand full comment
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022

Seems quite unclear from this if partisanship is in itself a factor. The finding aiui seems to be that sharing "misinformation" is so correlated with political leaning that it's basically impossible to treat them separably. (Also editing to say I *do* think this is good support for the idea that "wanting to make transphobic jokes" really isn't the motivator here and that's unfair by Matt)

> Overall, then, the substantially higher suspension rate of Republicans and conservatives could be explained as well, or better, by preferential suspension of users who shared information from untrustworthy news sites. (Because the politics measures and the misinformation measures are very highly correlated with each other, 0.75 ≤r≤ 0.87 depending on the measures, multicollinearity issues make it infeasible to predict suspension using both politics and misinformation in the same model)

Expand full comment

Partial least squares analysis corrects for multicollinearity, so the authors could have done that. And because this not yet a published paper, maybe they are.

My broader point is that harassment is not correlated with being banned even though I think we would all agree that harassment should be the one thing that guarantees someone's account is suspended. If you look at figure 2, the correlation of partisanship to being banned is the same as article sharing, but also much, much more than harassment.

Expand full comment

They seem to?

Expand full comment

I have never heard of the Twitter account for a progressive indie film getting "accidentally" banned the day it premiers, but I might just be reading the wrong news sources.

https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/anti-abortion-movie-twitter-suspended-reinstated-1203176735/amp/

Expand full comment

Like a medieval free thinker purchasing indulgences, he needs to occasionally offer very uncharitable conventional lefty takes for positionality reasons!

Just like old school ACLU was all about defending neo Nazis right to terrify people!

Expand full comment
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022

Or, ya know, he could just genuinely believe the things that he says.

Expand full comment

I would give up on "false consciousness"Matthew Yglesias at this point. He explicitly claims he doesn't read the room.

Expand full comment
founding

Bad behavior for a supposed popularist!

Expand full comment

How I would gloss this is that Matthew Yglesias views popularism as the appropriate way to do politics at the current time, but recognizes that he is temperamentally unsuited to carrying out these policies as a politician, so he focuses on influencing politics in the best way he knows how. Precisely because he believes too many people are not paying attention to what politics is actually about, he has to be "that guy" who brings up inconvenient facts. He seems to have accepted that he has no future as a politician or a leader of a large team.

Expand full comment

To try to engage with you constructively. You seem unhappy to be taking criticism due to the actions of scumbags who you feel don't speak for you. How do you see that situation changing? I think the only way is for Trump and his fellow scumbags to be tossed out. To do that, you're going to have to hold you nose and support Democrats, until Trump goes and a normal conservative movement returns. Liz Cheney has proven up to the challenge.

Expand full comment

I have certainly inferred that John from FL is willing to hold his nose and vote against Trump.

I interpret his comment though as letting people know that he finds jokes like that insulting. To the extent you _also_ want people who disagree with you to hold their noses and vote against Trump, skipping easy "own the conservatives" comment seems worth it.

I wouldn't assume he's saying that Matt's comment would make _John_ vote differently, but that it was still unappreciated.

Expand full comment

I almost never see this attitude from the commentariat when Matt makes similar jokes or comments about the "woke"/activist/very online left.

Expand full comment

Not about Matt's jokes, but note that when "hippie punching" was too prevalent in the comments, people started to push back on it. This suggests a higher _tolerance_ for it, but not absolute.

Whether they _should_ also complain about Matt saying this, if I could hazard a guess as to why they don't:

I believe very few of the commentariat her want to make either transphobic jokes or abolish the police. Most are center-left, with some closer to center-right.

Center-right are in a minority, and Matt clearly identifies as center-left.

If he makes a joke about the far left, the center-left people feel like he's "one of them" and so tend to let it slide, they don't feel attacked.

The center-right people of course don't feel attacked.

Any individual more left wing person _might_ feel this way, but his comments here tend to be of the form "Your methods are bad at achieving your goals" whereas the comments about conservatives are "Your goals are bad".

(Yes he has said that Abolish the Police is a bad goal, but has suggested that it's partly a bad goal because it's a bad goal on the way to the uber-goal of better safety AND equality, not that the uber-goal is also bad)

Caveat:

I'm much more centrist (whether right/left I'm not currently sure) so things that might still offend someone more leftwing I might not notice to complain about.

Expand full comment

As one of the people that pushed back against hippie punching, I'd characterize it somewhat differently -- there simply are very few commentators with social views to the left of Matt's to complain about it.

The population here is left-wing relative to the population, and fiscally left-wing, but I don't see many people singing the praises of the Justice Democrats or whatever. It's just a question of who gets a safe space.

(See, for instance, the reaction to this.)

https://www.slowboring.com/p/pro-life-austerity-good-luck-with

Expand full comment
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022

Eh. Matt throws shade at folks on the left and the right. This is why folks on the left are pissed at him all the time. Do you think Sunrise, and "abolish the police" and "close the schools" and NIMBYs (I could go on) think every shot he takes is providing a fair nuanced perspective on their views?

If you want someone who always goes out of the way to be super respectful than probably not following the right guy. He makes jokes... it's part of his brand.

Expand full comment
founding

Well said, A.D. I have nothing to add to your response.

Expand full comment

I also appreciated A.D.'s response. I guess I would add that since it appears to be our fate to try to work together in an uncomfortable coalition, restraint about making unnecessary criticism is good, but so is restraint about taking offence.

Expand full comment

I’ve had a crisis of conscience on whether to vote for Abrams or Kemp when Kemp kept me free during the pandemic and Democratic counties have a nasty habit of coercively masking me when I visit their courthouses and jails.

Kemp opposes Medicaid expansion, so I’ll vote for Abrams, but coercive masking, and Abram’s failure to disassociate herself from its advocates, has made this hard for me.

Expand full comment
founding

To many in response to my original comment, though, Kemp isn't a person to be evaluated based on his views, policy positions and actions. He is just a vessel into which to pour every GOP excess (of which there are plenty). It appears to be partisanship above all. I subscribe to many substacks, including this one, to avoid those us-vs-them partisan approaches.

Expand full comment

If push comes to shove, do you think Kemp will put party before the country? That's the operative point. It's clear that the House and Senate Republican party will put party before country.

Expand full comment
founding

Since I'm not a citizen of Georgia, I can honestly say that I have no idea. It doesn't matter, anyway: he won't be my Governor whether he wins or loses.

Expand full comment

It matters to the people of Georgia, and if the presidential election comes down to certifying votes in Georgia, it matters to us all.

Expand full comment

That photo of Abrams maskless in front of a fully masked very young elementary school class really does bother a lot of reasonable people. And they are entirely reasonable to be upset.

Expand full comment

Is it not true? Conservatives aren't being censored for saying they want low taxes or less government. They get censored for conspiracy theories and hate speech. And then the conservatives who aren't posting that kind of stuff freak out about it.

Expand full comment

Matt’s language bites hard when this platform has not been particularly welcoming towards those who want to protect womens’ sports from gender dysphoric men. Accurately describing gender dysphoric men is not a joke, it shouldn’t have to be a courageous stand, it is just seeing the world as it is rather than as activists imagine it.

Expand full comment
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022

Fair, the right to have ridiculous lies about elections amplified is probably more mportant to them.

Expand full comment

What would you boil the complaint down to? Trump ban?

Please not something like ‘they should be friendlier to conservatives’.

assume they are going to keep moderating content bc they sincerely believe it’s in their businesses interest. What are some good rules to train the mods on that would help conservatives feel better? Stay away from banning / putting warnings on current and former Republican elected officials and give them a freer hand?

It does feel like, practically, letting more covid ‘disinformation’ go by and letting more people reported for anti trans stuff slide would be my go to after just going easy on Republican Party officials.

Expand full comment

1. Not banning people on clearly politically motivated grounds, eg, Hunter Biden laptop stuff.

2. Not banning people for "deadnaming" people.

3. Not having moderation policies that punish moderately rude conservative tweeters more than moderately rude libs.

Expand full comment

It would be easier to take conservatives' complaints about Twitter seriously if they weren't looking for persecution under every bed. I remember the firestorm about the IRS going after conservative groups and that turned out to be a bogus claim (there was no specific focus on conservative groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy#:~:text=Shulman%20about%20the%20allegations%20in,2012%20phase%20of%20the%20investigation.)

Expand full comment

One is tough for me as I don’t know who was banned in this case and for what, but it makes sense. I would guess the more general rule would be like I said about giving Party spokespeople more room? That way they could just link to whatever oppo stuff they want in the last two weeks of campaign and Twitter could stay out of deciding what’s newsworthy in that high leverage situation?

two is just the thing Matt made snark about that John found insulting. It does seem to be pretty high on the list!

Could you tell me what policies make up complaint three? Is it being moderately rude to trans people again that’s punished asymmetrically or is there more that jumps out?

Expand full comment
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022

Twitter's user guidelines are vague and don't address a lot of specific behavior. For example, I believe one of their guidelines is "don't be evil" or something like that statement. It seems great in theory until you get to the issue of defining what counts as "evil."

Charlie Cooke at National Review has offered three steps Twitter can take to improve itself and they all seem reasonable to me: make guidelines about specific behaviors and actions rather than vague values, build a workplace culture that thinks free speech and expression are important, and be more transparent when guidelines are broken.

Expand full comment

Well I’m torn because I agree Twitter could do better quite easily but I also think dissatisfaction with such codes as we actually find spelled out in more detail and administered legalistically is very common among conservatives

Expand full comment

There is a subset of conservative jerks who just want to harass and attack individuals. To be fair, this subset is quite large, but it is not a majority of conservatives and the majority would be okay with such people not getting their way.

Expand full comment

1) It probably doesn't make business sense for Twitter executives to ban political tweets they disagree with. If you piss off enough conservatives, they may go to a competitor (the fact that Truth Social hasn't worked out so far doesn't mean it couldn't under new ownership, and obviously a new competitor could be founded).

2) But, if Twitter executives were stupid and didn't care about losing traffic, are you claiming they should nonetheless be forced to allow their site to host views they abhor?

Expand full comment

There was a story in the paper yesterday about Truth Social's parent company. Despite DJT having 90% ownership, a whistleblower said he was being retaliated against for not handing more stock over to Melania; they forced two founders off the board and replaced them with Devin Nunes' former aid and Don Jr, who was demanding a paycheck for doing literally nothing, crashing the share price of the SPAC they are trying to use to cash in on. Anyway, Truth Social is not a serious company. It is just another Trump scam.

I'd be curious to see if a real company run by serious people could actually thrive with a pro-conservative social media business model.

Expand full comment

I’m not sure what you mean by 2 exactly but I certainly think it’s true for some cases. Govt is constrained to a political, legal, and constitutional process in this. But eg if we took up the question of making Twitter carry messages from all currently elected federal politicians? Seems like this could well be a valid matter to bind their executives on, on a lot of levels.

Expand full comment

But what if some elected officials lie about the election being stolen, or about how we should fear vaccines? Let them find a website that's amenable to spreading their lies. There's plenty of bandwidth out there.

Much better to simply allow people to sue Twitter (ie, pare back the open-ended legal immunity on user-generated content) than mess with the First Amendment. Of course, if you want offer to require Fox News to give slots to Lawrence O'Donnell I'm all ears...

(Not really all ears; neither Twitter nor Fox should be required to promote viewpoints they disagree with.)

Expand full comment

I still think the best kind of regulation of social media companies would be to "tax" "engagement." [Maybe the tax would be aimed at the revenue generated by the adds appearing rather than the hours spent. If the content were add free the media company would pay.] That the would promote content that would lead to people not spending lots of time on the medium. If cat videos or Trump tweets were too popular it would be in the financial interest of the media company to adjust their algorithms to make them less popular. The idea probably could be tweaked.

Expand full comment

As someone who is decidedly pro free speech - this was a good article, because I really hadn’t considered this point. Most coverage seems to imply that Musk ownership over Twitter would definitely increase free speech and then opinion on whether or not that’s a good or bad thing splits on ideological lines.

My question however would be whether Twitter actually is an important platform on the scale that MY and other MSM suggest (comparing it’s importance to flagship MSM outlets like the NYT etc). I don’t use Twitter, but it seems mainly like a place that produces significant amounts of useless drama and bad takes. It also seems like the overinflated importance of Twitter stems directly from the fact that it’s biggest users are all Blue check marks who work in media/journalism and wrote the articles about its importance.

Expand full comment

As a long time Twitter stalker (#nevertweet) I agree that those who's direct business/influence is supported by Twitter activity (cough, cough...) sometimes tend to overstate it's real world importance.

Expand full comment

Is it as important as Fox News and the NYT? No... but the fact it's "all Blue check marks who work in media/journalism" is what makes it punch above it's weight in driving the media narrative.

Expand full comment

And in destroying the credibility of the people and institutions that drive the media narrative.

Expand full comment

I think the fact that all those people are on twitter is also a good indicator that their consumer base (the type of people who click on articles from prestige publications with the intention of actually reading them) is on twitter more than other social media platforms, which tracks with my totally subjective and anecdotal feeling that the general intelligence level is higher (and it is this somewhat greater capacity that enables the twitter discourse to be so infuriatingly and paradoxically stupid -- genuinely stupid people arent smart enough to be creatively wrong in the ways twitter users are every day)

Expand full comment
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022

I would ask about this in the mailbag, but given Matt's contempt for the legal system, I don't see much hope he'd answer it, so I'll just float it here instead:

As everyone knows, private actors are generally not subject to the First Amendment. There is, however, an exception to that rule: where a private actor has been deputized or otherwise directed by a state actor to take actions that violate someone's First Amendment rights, the private actor can be held liable along with the state actor at least where the state actor is a political entity subject to 42 U.S.C. 1983 (I'd need to research what actual case law there is on applying this doctrine to the federal government, but I believe the consensus is that it would).

This historically has no relevance to the PRC's coercion of American businesses and organizations because there's no facial constitutional problem with a foreign government deputizing or directing private actors to violate Americans' First Amendment rights. However, what if 42 U.S.C. 1983 was amended to add "Foreign Nation" to the existing list of political entities that could be sued under the statute ("any State or Territory or the District of Columbia")? This would obviously be creating an exception to the general rule of foreign sovereign immunity in the American courts, but it also seems like it would be really awkward for members of Congress to explain why foreign nations should have the power to violate the constitutional rights of people inside the US's borders. This would also then open up the possibility of actions by residents of the US versus private businesses to the extent those businesses adopt policies inside the US under pressure from the PRC that are intended to limit Americans' free speech.

Expand full comment

I love it! Who do I start harassing to make this happen?

Expand full comment

It requires federal legislation, so you could write to your U.S. representative and senators.

Expand full comment

This is a boring and predictable take, not what I expect from Matt usually. He could probably do a takedown of this on his new podcast if he was into meta self-reflection.

China is a rising superpower and America is the only real counter weight that exists in the world.

I think the intertwining of American business interests and Chinese state interests is ultimately a good thing for the world. It, more than any hawkish political behavior or posturing is what will prevent two massive state powers from going to war.

Unlike in Russia, it would be extremely hard for the US to disentangle American interests in China, but this runs in the other direction as well. China really doesn’t want wholesale banning of Chinese produced goods. The microprocessor kerfluffle shows just how deep the pain can run in a single industry.

We don’t know what Musk will do with Twitter. We do know that he purports to want twitter because he sees an organization with enormous influence being largely led and manipulated by one political side as a bad thing.

Expand full comment

Sure, entangling economic interests are good. The issue is how to prevent CCP from influencing US culture so that no criticism of CCP policies is possible.

Expand full comment

This is exactly what people said about Germany and the UK during the first phase of globalization and we got WW1 followed by WW2.

Expand full comment

I don't think it prevents war. It dissuades it and acts as one of many factors keeping the possibility of war in check.

Expand full comment

As an American I don’t have any interest in the United States avoiding war with China by ceasing to be the United States and becoming China. Americans consuming American media shouldn’t be subject to Chinese state censorship; this is, in fact, something the US government should consider using force to achieve.

Expand full comment

Pretty amazing to watch a new hawkish foreign policy "consensus" emerge overnight, with the convenient side effect of attacking a right-ish pro free speech icon + someone who isn't pro unions (witness Biden avoiding mentioning him when he talks about other electric car companies!).

Very convenient for those who dislike Musk for other reasons.

Expand full comment

The new consensus on China has been emerging over the last ten years. I wouldn't exactly call that overnight. Matt's been pretty upfront about coding things in conservative values to appeal to a wider audience. That doesn't mean the arguments aren't genuine, it means there are a lot of different ways to come to the same conclusion. If you disagree with the argument itself then disagree. But attacking someone's motives because you don't have an argument is a tired old trope.

Expand full comment

The most curious thing to me about the Elon/Twitter saga is that no one ever mentions the fact that currently the key financial stakeholders in Twitter (and lots of tech) are Wahhabist princes from the Gulf. There are lots of criticisms of Musk, but is he actually more 'conservative' in any meaningful way than them?

Which isn't to say I don't agree with the larger point. US business relationships with China has major implications for America's culture of free expression. They aren't our friends and decades of trying to make change that through integration into the world economy has been a huge policy failure. I'm just not sure Elon Musk is really the right way into that conversation. If he wasn't triggering the libs on social media I doubt he'd be anyone's go to example on the subject.

Expand full comment
founding

it’s because no one really cares about the plot of what the Main Character does, all they care about is that they can jeer them on in ways that fit with their prescribed views and assumptions. It’s basically like Real Housewives for Cultural Elite folks into politics at this point. Plot doesn’t matter, we’ll just fix it in post.

Expand full comment

There’s been a strange vibe among the very online lefties who tend to populate Twitter. There was a period where criticism of China seemed to code as right wing to many of them, I think because Trump was being so critical of China.

Then during COVID, it was as if holding China accountable at all was letting Trump off the hook, and people didn’t want to hear it.

It’s been really strange to see people demand moral stances from their employers on the issue of the day, while their employers do business in Xinjiang, and otherwise cover for China.

The current unwillingness to bring up China when attacking Musk feels like an extension of these things.

Apologies for being all over the place, I’m supposed to be working at the moment. Ethan Strauss wrote an excellent “it’s ok to be mad at China/why isn’t it ok?” piece that gets at a lot of these things, for those who can read it.

https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/p/china-empathy-and-chamath

I’d love to post a few pertinent paragraphs from it, but don’t want to do that to Strauss.

Expand full comment

Not sure I follow what the FTC would investigate here. They have law enforcement authority over antitrust violations and "unfair and deceptive acts and practices". Censoring things for the Chinese government isn't an antitrust violation, it doesn't have anything to do with competition.

Maybe if you really squint you could say it is deceptive because Twitter is held out as unbiased but secretly acts in a pro-China way. But the fact you wrote this article kind of gives it away. The standards for this authority are also very tight, as a reasonable consumer must not be able to avoid the practice (in the statute). And in any case the suspicion that might happen is not something you could block the deal over, it would actually need to happen.

Notwithstanding the dreams of current leadership, the FTC isn't the national reviewer of whether we like people's business plans. It actually needs to prove a violation of the law.

Expand full comment

With the recent restrictions of chip exports to China, we’re dropping the pretense of making nice, so why not extend to other sectors? If selling to China induces companies to self-censor, why not just ban media companies (esp movie studios) from selling to China? I want to see a Bond movie with PRC bad-guys.

Expand full comment

Twitter might not be that important to the average person, but I just listened to Rachel Maddow on Ezra Klein's podcast and they both agreed that Trump's use of Twitter is what allowed him to drive the media narrative and coverage about himself. I'm not sure much has changed for the members of the media on Twitter.

Expand full comment

Business leaders in politics should come in for a lot more skepticism generally. One idea in particular that needs reconsideration, the desire to have business leaders run for political office. I think this idea has died an unceremonious death on the left with the growth of more explicitly anti-capitalist rhetoric from the fringe since 2009 and the election of Trump in 2016. But it's a good point for Republicans to internalize as well. As an example of a Democrat with uncomfortably close ties to foreign powers, I think Mike Bloomberg is the best recent case study. His 88% ownership Bloomberg LP (which had not insignificant financial stakes in China) combined with his weakness on Chinese political leadership should have been disqualifying. Serious writers talked about it in opinion pieces at the time, but there wasn't much of a popular outcry over this issue in particular.

Expand full comment
founding

In hindsight, it seems odd that China has not exerted any pressure on major platforms to moderate all anti-China content away from their non-domestic audiences...but historically the fact that all these platforms are blocked from day 1 in China means it’s much less of an issue for China.

The closest analogy is how China treated Google, and in that case they only demanded Google moderate search results for domestic audiences, not the rest of the world. Ultimately, Google gave up on the Chinese market and shelved the plan to build a censored version of Google.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/138307/how-google-took-on-china-and-lost/amp/

Additionally, its not clear to me that Twitter isn’t worth more to China as is (banned domestically, but utilized by hawkish Chinese dignitaries for Chinese propaganda and marketing) than in the way you describe. It’s pretty clear that any move to pressure Musk to ban (or shadowban) content China doesn’t like would be found out immediately and potentially lead to the death of the platform, and thus cause it to lose any value the Chinese get from it now as a diplomatic tool in which their own government officials dunk feverishly on other nations. Seems much easier to just pick and choose battles with individuals who have something to lose in China, as historically that has worked.

Expand full comment

>>In hindsight, it seems odd that China has not exerted any pressure on major platforms to moderate all anti-China content away from their non-domestic audiences.<<

What leverage do they have? Twitter, FB, Netflix and Google (including Youtube and all its other services) are blocked in China. These services do take advertising dollars (or RMB ) from Chinese parties wishing to reach Western consumers, I think, but the PRC perhaps doesn't want to mess with the ability of their own firmst to target foreigners (and this isn't a big revenue source, I think, for the Western firms in question, so losing it wouldn't be a major threat).

Expand full comment
founding

Well, for at least a short period (2006 to 2010) Google was available in China, i believe...and at that point the kind of influence Matt was worried about did not occur. Instead, all Chinese pressure was focused on what domestic audiences saw...

The hypothesis that China would utilize significant financial / market control over CEOs to control what third parties do or say elsewhere i think is a bit misread. China doesn’t have to get Apple or HBO to control what their big (or minor) stars say...it just has to control what those big stars say directly. It is a minor, but perhaps key, difference in how their soft power is flexed and works here.

We Americans, i think, want to read this as our Corporate Overlords telling us what to do...in reality, though we self censor and “read the room” when we realize it might matter to us...

Also, I do wonder to what degree a nation like China sees Twitter as a bit of an Achilles Heel for a Nation and really doesn’t want to do anything to get rid of it because of the fat tail it creates for political upheaval everywhere (up China). After all, they have to see it as such to ban it in their own nations....

Expand full comment
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022

I appreciate Matt’s admission that he doesn’t know exactly how Musk’s ownership of Twitter would affect its business model. I don’t understand that either.

Business concerns might force him to steer the company in a pro-authoritarian, anti-Lama anti-Xinjiang direction, but what would that involve? I read and reread the article, but I don’t see.

Is the idea that Twitter algorithms would be programmed to find and delete tweets including the word “Tiananmen?” Or are we thinking of a malevolent Chinese-style army of censors?

It’s certainly not good for a pro-China businessman to own a major American media company, but what precisely should we be afraid of? It’s early and I’m still half-asleep, so help me out with some speculation.

Expand full comment