I will never be accused of having a deep understanding of how things work. When I turn on the electrical switch or water faucet, I expect light and water to be delivered without knowing from whence or by what modality such critical necessities of modern life will appear..So it is when I click on the web browser icon. I expect to be transported to the strange environs of the world wide web without having the faintest clue about how I got there. I was so clued out that I thought that no one was making money on their websites until a friend disabused me of the notion. It turns out that he was making $40,000 a month with a website about dogs..I thought that artificial intelligence was a fad that would be mostly innocuous. Until I heard about “AI hallucinations” which are flat out, and often libelous, lies stated with great certainty and authority..“ChatGPT told me so!”.In a recent conversation, the Western Standard opinion editor and I discussed the incongruity of why one article will have a much greater reach than another, perhaps more interesting, article..“It is a mystery to me why people think one topic is vitally interesting and have no apparent interest in this other topic which more completely captured my curiosity. I don’t understand this internet stuff.”.How naïve I was..It is important that you know that I have never had a Twitter account. I also ended my addiction to Facebook some years ago when, in disgust over someone’s rejection of my very erudite argument about something that had no relevance to anything. I almost destroyed my laptop computer by throwing it into the chair. I am not a social media person..And so it was with only marginal interest that I noticed a news item about Elon Musk and his decision to curtail the number of tweets that people could read. People like me will not be allowed on the platform. That just means status quo ante for us, of course. But, Twitter account holders will be restricted to reading 600 tweets per day if they have an account and 6,000 tweets per day if they pay for a verified account..If you do the math, then six hundred tweets per day means reading a tweet every 75 seconds for eight hours per day. Six thousand tweets per day means reading five tweets per minute..Is that even possible?.Is this really about Mr. Musk driving more users to pay for a verified account, as protesters assert?.Nevertheless, an uproar followed his announcement..Apart from thinking that employers around the world should give a vote of thanks to Mr. Musk for doing their jobs by disciplining wayward employees, I didn’t give much thought to the news item..And then, with wide-eyed wonder, I read this article from Zerohedge.com. The anger directed by Twitter users towards Mr. Musk has nothing to do with the cost of upgrading to a verified user account and everything to do with an “AI censorship deathstar” as it is described in the article..I am not Luke Skywalker, but this sounded interesting. Maybe Mr. Musk really is a champion of free speech..It turns out that Big Tech firms such as Google continually “scrape” Twitter to read the hundreds of millions of Tweets each day so that their artificial intelligence bots can learn what is of interest to people on an ongoing basis..Even more interesting is that the FBI, the CIA, the DNI and a host of other agencies are also scraping Twitter to find out what people are saying and to then censor those things being said, that do not fall within approved topics..Remember all those funny tweets that you sent out a couple of years ago that now seem a bit on the wrong side of “woke”? It turns out that so does the CIA. How does that make you feel?.Who defines “approved topics” you ask? Well, this is where it gets interesting. As the so-called “Twitter files” — the reporting of Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Alex Berenson, David Zweig, and Michael Shellenberger — have uncovered, it is sometimes the President of the United States who might utter, “Kill that topic”..More often, of course, it is people who are further down the food chain in the US intelligence community that request tweets be censored. No wonder Alex Berenson is suing the Biden White House for infringement of his First Amendment rights to free speech..With Mr. Musk’s new rules, an artificial intelligence bot will not have much to feast on when it is limited to six thousand (moving to eight thousand) tweets per day. In fact, with such a small dataset, I could probably rank as accurately as the artificial intelligence program people’s topics of interest..And right on schedule, ChatGPT has reported that its internet smorgasbord has been limited. But it is very polite about telling you to go pound sand..So, what was the real purpose of Twitter, and do we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Musk for pulling the wraps off what appears to be a giant intelligence gathering death star machine?.Will Mr. Musk soon face the same legal consequences as Mr. Snowden and Mr. Assange? Who knows but this new information sheds light on why some articles are unexpectedly read tens of thousands of times more than others..When you get the bots on your side, apparently, good things can happen. Who knew?
