Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

You can’t ban the English Defence League because it doesn’t exist but you can force Telegram to shut down organising groups

I spent my train journey home last night thinking about exactly the point which Phil BC makes forcefully here:

And the Daily Mail have reported that Yvette Cooper is considering banning the English Defence League. The first problem is the EDL doesn’t exist except as lazy short hand for far right mobilisation. She would be banning a phantom. The organisation of the Southport racists is decentralised and distributed and doesn’t have a formal structure with an HQ, bank accounts, and assets. There is no CEO or SLT, and no membership list. Just interlinked Facebook and WhatsApp groups, mailing lists, forums, and social media influencer networks. If Cooper wants a crack down she’s going to have to take on the platform giants. And, as we know, Labour would rather shy away from confronting the powerful.

https://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/

There is organisation here but there isn’t an organisation. These organisational capacities saturate the platform ecosystem in a way which means that banning them would have to be a sustained undertaking, pursued over time across multiple channels in an iterative way. It would mean taking the platform ecosystem as a serious object of public policy.

Which is exactly what the Online Harms Bill was intended to do, for all its problematic elements. What effect would it have on the moderation of far-right content within groups which are demonstrably be used to (loosely) organise racist violence across the UK if the punishment regime for platform firms, up to 10% of global revenues and threat of jail sentences for executives, were applied here? This isn’t an unsolvable problem, as if these capacities for organising without organisation have magically emerged beyond the usual laws of the social realm.

, , ,