There is an even greater threat to U.S. tech companies that has gotten far less attention. In sharp contrast to today’s United States, the European Union has a strong commitment to the rule of law, obliging politicians to comply with judge’s rulings. The Trump administration’s scofflaw tendencies and tech companies’ increasing hostility toward European values may lead to the collapse of the EU-U.S. arrangements on which tech companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft depend.
Schmidt worried a decade ago that an EU-U.S. data dispute might collapse the Internet. Snowden showed how U.S. intelligence agencies had illicitly accessed European social media and Internet search data, breaching European privacy rules. That dispute was patched over by an ungainly agreement, negotiated between the European Commission and the U.S. government. The EU agreed to allow data flows, as long as the United States committed to protecting the privacy rights of EU citizens and offered some means of redress if they were violated by U.S. surveillance agencies. The keystone of the arrangement was a 2016 U.S. commitment that Washington’s surveillance agencies would respect European privacy rights through a process overseen by an obscure U.S. body, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
This arrangement made nobody happy but provided legal and political cover for flows of data across the Atlantic. Meta continued to operate Facebook in Europe, and companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were able to host Europeans’ personal data on their cloud-computing platforms. For those companies, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Google alone makes over $100 billion in sales in Europe.
Some of Trump’s critics used sketchy arguments and weak empirical evidence to accuse Facebook and other social media services of having allowed Russian propagandists to manipulate Americans into voting for a leader with authoritarian predilections.
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Showing a little bias there
I truly agree with that statement. Foreign influence campaigns have an effect but they can’t turn the tide and that tide came sweeping in the US. You also need to consider that all of the sides (domestic, foreign) employ information warfare, they’d be dumb not to. Russian misinfo is so effective and prominent because we are sweeping problems under the rug.
Sorry, in case I was unclear. I take issue with ‘sketchy arguments and weak empirical evidence’. There’s nothing sketchy or weak about the evidence that FB et al were (and still are) being utilised by Russia.
Yes, but the extent or effect of this influence is not very well supported.
There is obviously no way to measure actual impact. However, it’s well-documented that their efforts are extremely intensive and wide-ranging.
That’s the evidence of existence of influence campaigns which was never under dispute. What I’m saying is that there’s no concrete way to measure the effect that influence campaign has and therefore any argument saying that Trump won because of influence campaigns lacks evidence of the scale of effect they had.
No disagreement there, mainly because as I mentioned it’s one of those things that is pretty much impossible to measure. However they were obviously a major factor, given the extent of their operations, so to postulate that they might have been THE deciding factor is not illogical either.
It would be a much safer claim if the gap in popular vote wasn’t so huge. Democrats just didn’t show up to vote but most claim it was the Republicans that were under the influence. Did Russians affect voter turnout positively? Maybe that was enough to help Trump win.
I don’t think they changed any minds however, since that’s near damn impossible these days. That means that the only thing that could be exploited by propaganda was something created by Americans for Americans and that had to come out sooner or later because it was ignored by everyone for 50 years now.
