There’s a backstory behind this Washington Post story on Republican persecution of academics, and it’s one that doesn’t make the Intercept look good.
Jordan’s colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with a frequent target of right-wing activists, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda, according to people familiar with the events. Last week, Jordan (Ohio) threatened legal action against Stanford University, home to the Stanford Internet Observatory, for not complying fully with his records requests. … The push caps years of pressure from conservative activists who have harangued such academics online and in person and filed open-records requests to obtain the correspondence of those working at public universities. The researchers who have been targeted study the online spread of disinformation, including falsehoods that have been accelerated by former president and candidate Donald Trump and other Republican politicians. … Last month, the founder of the conspiracy-theory-prone outlet the Gateway Pundit and others sued Starbird and Stanford academics Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta, alleging that they are part of a “government-private censorship consortium” that tramples on free speech. …
“Whether directly or indirectly, a government-approved or-facilitated censorship regime is a grave threat to the First Amendment and American civil liberties,” Jordan wrote.
The claim that these academics are part of a “government-approved or-facilitated censorship regime” is complete bullshit. But it is bullshit that was popularized by a grossly inaccurate story at the Intercept, which purported to discover a secret collaboration between academics and DHS to censor the American right wing.
Full disclosure – I know Kate Starbird, Renee DiResta and Alex Stamos. Not super well – they’re friendly acquaintances – but we’re on first name terms. I also have some sense (mostly indirectly and from social media) of the kinds of political and personal harassment that they have had to endure as a result of the piece by Ken Klippenstein (who is still at the Intercept) and Lee Fang (who left the Intercept to start a Substack newsletter). And I know the world they’re in. I don’t have any government funding, and haven’t been involved in any projects like the ones they have been working on, but I regularly go to conferences with people in this world. and have a sense of how they think, and what they are doing. Which is why I’m writing this post. The Intercept piece not only stinks, but has become the foundation for a much bigger heap of nasty.
You can read the Intercept article here. It’s very long and quite disorganized. The relevant claims:
Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms. …The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. … Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. … the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.” … . “This makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue,” said Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La … Meeting records of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, the main subcommittee that handles disinformation policy at CISA, show a constant effort to expand the scope of the agency’s tools to foil disinformation. … In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA — which includes Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird — drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the “information ecosystem.” The report called on the agency to closely monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.” They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the “spread of false and misleading information,” with a focus on information that undermines “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures.” … Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.
The problem, as Mike Masnick wrote at the time, is that this is basically all horseshit (the unironic MaKeS BeNgHaZi LoOk SmAlL quote is a dead giveaway). “Obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit” sounds dead sexy, but it’s the “as well as public documents” at the end that is really doing most the work. The actual information that the Intercept article quotes, out of context to make it seem all scary, is pretty well all in the public domain, obtainable via Google search. As Mike notes:
if you read the actual document it’s… all kinda reasonable? It does talk about responding to misinformation and disinformation threats, mainly around elections — not by suppressing speech, but by sharing information to help local election officials respond to it and provide correct information. From the actual, non-scary, very public report:
Currently, many election officials across the country are struggling to conduct their critical work of administering our elections while responding to an overwhelming amount of inquiries, including false and misleading allegations. Some elections officials are even experiencing physical threats. Based on briefings to this subcommittee by an election official, CISA should be providing support — through education, collaboration, and funding — for election officials to pre-empt and respond to MD
It includes four specific recommendations for how to deal with mis- and disinformation and none of them involve suppressing it. They all seem to be about responding to and countering such information by things like “broad public awareness campaigns,” “enhancing information literacy,” “providing informational resources,” “providing education frameworks,” “boosting authoritative sources,” and “rapid communication.” See a pattern? All of this is about providing information, which makes sense. Nothing about suppressing. The report even notes that there are conflicting studies on the usefulness of “prebunking/debunking” misinformation, and suggests that CISA pay attention to where that research goes before going too hard on any program.
If you want to get a sense of how truly bad the Intercept article is, read everything that Mike has to say (his piece is long too). The most damning bit:
But the Intercept, apparently desperate to put in some shred that suggests this proves the government is looking to suppress information, slips in this paragraph:
The report called on the agency to closely monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.” They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt the “spread of false and misleading information,” with a focus on information that undermines “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures.”
Note the careful use of quotes. All of the problematic words and phrases like “closely monitor” and “take steps to halt” are not in the report at all. You can go read the damn thing. It does not say that it should “closely monitor” social media platforms of all sizes. It says that the misinformation/disinformation problem involves the “entire information ecosystem.” It’s saying that to understand the flow of this, you have to recognize that it flows all over the place. And that’s accurate. It says nothing about monitoring it, closely or otherwise.
In short, the Intercept article is at best horseshit. Klippenstein and Fang make big claims that they don’t deliver on. As it turned out, these were politically convenient big claims for some people. Specifically, for Elon Musk – the allegations in this Intercept article become one of the key bases for the so-called Twitter files, heaping up new and enormous piles of horseshit before Musk fell out with the soi-disant journalists that he’d given access to, and his own lawyers called nope. Also, for a whole lot of Republican activists. And, as the Post article describes, for Jim Jordan’s witch-hunting committee, which has turned these allegations into a Grand Theory of Government Suppression of Free Speech, which they’re using to target academics whose only apparent fault was to provide the US government advice about the extent, nature of, and possible solutions to the disinformation problem.
The Intercept article is still up. It shouldn’t be. It isn’t just that the article is demonstrably and terribly wrong. It is that it is demonstrably causing genuine and continued harm and distress to people whose lives have been turned upside down. I’ve seen Twitter fights where Fang in particular tried to defend the piece (mostly through tu quoque rather than actually engaging with criticisms). I haven’t seen any sign that the editors of the Intercept have addressed the pushback to the piece (perhaps I’ve missed it). If I were to guess, I’d suspect that people at the Intercept know that the piece stinks, but feel that it’s awkward to confront it. The Intercept has been a notoriously fractious organization, with people leaving in angry huffs, being forced to leave, newsroom leaks and the like. I can understand why they don’t want more drama. But that doesn’t make it right. It’s an article whose fundamental flaws have caused specific hurt and had wide repercussions for American media and politics. Fixing fuck-ups like this is Journalism Ethics 101.
And there’s a deeper story here about something that has gone badly wrong with one part of the American left, which I used to be reasonably friendly with, and have found increasingly weird and alienating over the last few years (some things I used to think, I don’t think any more; some people I respected, I’ve given up on). One of the key consequences of the Intercept article has been to undermine efforts to understand, let alone push back against, democratic disinformation. I suspect that is an intended consequence. The article’s authors make it clear that they don’t think that government should have any role in making the information environment better. That’s an argument that I strongly disagree with, but it is not an inherently stupid argument. What is stupid – and worse than stupid – is the conspiratorial logic they use to defend it, patching together out-of-context quotes, breathless rhetoric, and disconnected factoids to suggest by sheer force of volume that There Is Something Wicked Going On. A healthy distrust of the state has mutated into a creepy wake-up-sheeple paranoia. The Intercept is still publishing good journalism (e.g.). But this is a style of writing that it needs to cut off at the roots.
{ 11 comments }
MisterMr 06.09.23 at 9:21 am
It seems to me that “conspiracy” is sorta like some archetypical fantasy: the world is not going in the direction I want and therefore I must blame it on someone.
This is something quite different from being pissed of by some social movement or cultural change, there is a personification of the “opponent” that is needed, because it makes the world seem more emotionally understandable.
IMHO, this is something that is more typical of the right, but it is creeping in the left too. I think that some parts of “wokeism” are like this too, particularly when nasty stuff like structural racism pr sexism (that really exist) is implicitly recast as hating blacks or women (which is a different thing but is more understandable emotively).
Alex SL 06.10.23 at 1:18 am
MisterMr,
I’d say a difference is that hatred of minorities or women demonstrably exist, and some people display their hatred quite visibly, even as that is not the same as structural discrimination. (For example, nobody can tell me that the last few UK home secretaries do not hate all immigrants who arrived later than their own parents with the fire of a thousand burning suns.)
Then there is also the problem that certain beliefs that could be said to be conspiracy-shaped, e.g., that this or that government is in cahoots with the fossil fuel industry, are effectively accurate, although it doesn’t take the form of a shadowy cabal meeting to discuss their nefarious plan of destroying our children’s future for the evulz but “merely” a revolving door of influence-taking and everybody nodding sagely about how they are doing what is necessary to keep the economy strong.
A better parallel might be certain strands of antisemitism or medical woo that exist on the left.
TF79 06.10.23 at 8:22 pm
“ A healthy distrust of the state has mutated into a creepy wake-up-sheeple paranoia.” – this seems to have permeated from the national stage all the way down to hyper-local affairs as well (like mundane things of fixing potholes and tree maintenance on city land)
MisterMr 06.11.23 at 6:35 am
@Alex Sl
Point taken.
TM 06.12.23 at 6:57 am
Thanks for this piece, which gives a reasonably short overview. I have one question: what is “democratic disinformation”?
rivelle 06.14.23 at 12:42 am
The liberal-technocratic solution of “fact-checking” is futile and useless in a time of alt-fact extremist rightist politics. Rightist “facts” are not accessed epistemologically in accordance to a criteria of truth or falsity but are instead assessed affectively in accordance to the agitational capacity of a proposition to grant permission to rightists to commit acts of violence. QAnon is a paradigm of the method by which rightists demonize their opponents with any lunacy, no matter how radically divorced from reality, such that any and all violent means are justified to carry out their extermination.
(For further detail see e.g. Erich Fromm on the anatomy of human destructiveness; Amanda Marcotte’s “Troll Nation”)
The old expression “A conspiracy theory is a poor man’s ideology” is incomprehensible to virtually everybody today as the word “ideology” has become mostly an insult. Systematic and structural explanations of events and actions are routinely dismissed with an illogical reductio ad “conspiracy theory”. A properly systematic understanding of the world, alongside the recognition that this systematic understanding is necessary, used to be described as a “world-view” or as an “ideology” in the neutral sense of the word. This neutral sense has now disappeared and the word “ideology” is now wholly a pejorative. This of course does not mean that we are free of yoke of being ideologically driven. It just means another barrier which occludes the understanding of the role that ideologies play in human behavior.
But more importantly this condition is a barrier to the development of a systematic comprehension of the world. In such an epistemological vacuum, stupefying and madness-inducing conspiracy theories find a natural need that they can fulfil and in which they can lodge themselves.
This loss of systematic understanding is a manifestation in the shape of an epistemological crisis of a series of underlying processes of profound historical transition. “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Immanuel Wallerstein describes this condition of profound historical transition and concomitant epistemological crisis in the title of his book “The End of the World as We Know It”
“a state-of-the-world address, delivered by a scholar uniquely suited to the task. Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most prominent social scientists of our time, documents the profound transformations our world is undergoing. With these transformations, he argues, come equally profound changes in how we understand the world. Wallerstein divides his work between an appraisal of significant recent events and a study of the shifts in thought influenced by those events. The book’s first half reviews the major happenings of recent decades-the collapse of the Leninist states, the exhaustion of national liberation movements, the rise of East Asia, the challenges to national sovereignty, the dangers to the environment, the debates about national identity, and the marginalization of migrant populations. Wallerstein places these events and trends in the context of the changing modern world-system as a whole and identifies the historical choices they put before us. The second half of the book takes up current issues in the world of knowledge-the vanishing faith in rationality, the scattering of knowledge activities, the denunciation of Eurocentrism, the questioning of the division of knowledge into science and humanities, and the relation of the search for the true and the search for the good. Wallerstein explores how these questions have arisen from larger social transformations, and why the traditional ways of framing such debates have become obstacles to resolving them. The End of the World As We Know It concludes with a crucial analysis of the momentous intellectual challenges to social science as we know it and suggests possible responses to them.”
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=582C96F5E94FF97B88959900C2001468
We are past the tipping-point of the Seneca Cliff.
All of the vital trajectories of contemporary human and terrestrial history are headed towards the end-state conditions of a series of viciously morbid systemic and structural asymptotic fault lines and processes – ecocidal climate change; oligarchical capitalist class warfare; the continuing historical phenomena of military conflict without the existence of counteractive pacifist and peacemaking historical processes to act as a counterweight – that are ineluctably leading the human species to an extended period of great suffering in hell on earth.
engels 06.17.23 at 11:35 am
engels 06.17.23 at 5:51 pm
All of the vital trajectories of contemporary human and terrestrial history are headed towards the end-state conditions of a series of viciously morbid systemic and structural asymptotic fault lines and processes – ecocidal climate change; oligarchical capitalist class warfare; the continuing historical phenomena of military conflict without the existence of counteractive pacifist and peacemaking historical processes to act as a counterweight – that are ineluctably leading the human species to an extended period of great suffering in hell on earth.
Eric Idle voice Cheer up Brian, you know what they say…
rivelle 06.19.23 at 12:16 am
@engels at 8
Having arrived at a position of despair and dismay, I have been concerned with the further question of how to go on without Hope (Ernst Bloch).
“Cheering up” seems to be a little obscene in the face of destruction and great suffering. I have always been “religiously unmusical”, to borrow Max Weber’s phrase, and so there is no salvific path of consolation to be found in a confessional community of some sort. W.B. Yeats’s poem “Lapis Lazuli” seems to offer advice much like yours and to be joyful (Yeats uses the word “gay” in the old, now mostly archaic sense of the word). But it can be noted that Yeats can only conceive of this carefree joy in the form of aesthetic objects projected into an Orientalist Shangri La (the “Chinamen” of the poem”).
The state of mind and affective disposition which the Epicureans called ataraxia is only something that I have arrived at via a process of cogitation and not, unfortunately by a more natural path of existential disposition or temperament. The concept is not encountered outside of books on Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. Whilst it seems about right as a state of mind that could allow one to get through the days of one’s life, ataraxia hasn’t survived to the modern day. I have a terrible feeling that in a 21st setting ataraxia, and the closely related concept of aponia, might be a state of near-total idiocy such as that displayed by the eponymous character in the movie “Happy like Lazzarro”. If instead ataraxia is closer to Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness, it can be noted that Buddhism is also a world-denying set of precepts.
rivelle 06.19.23 at 12:18 am
should have read “I have a terrible feeling, that in a 21st century setting ataraxia”
engels 06.21.23 at 9:23 am
Fortunately in Britain conspiracy theories are stopped before anyone is tempted to believe them.
Comments on this entry are closed.