- RACKET NEWS - MATT TAIBBI - APRIL 25, 2023 -
Introduction to a series of features about the new global speech-policing bureaucracy, uncovered in the Twitter Files and beyond
Today you’ll find two new #TwitterFiles threads out, one by longtime Racket contributor Matt Orfalea, and another by Andrew Lowenthal, who worked for 18 years defending digital rights at EngageMedia and watched activists in his space slowly be absorbed by what we’re now calling “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
The two new threads collectively show the wide political range of revelations in the #TwitterFiles material, which have been slandered — absurdly — as a partisan exercise. Lowenthal, who in his “Insider’s Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation’” describes himself as a “progressive-minded Australian,” printed a series of exchanges between journalists who attended a summer “tabletop exercise” at the Aspen Institute about a hack-and-leak operation involving Burisma and Hunter Biden, weeks before the actual event. When the actual scandal broke not long after, the existence of that tabletop exercise clearly become newsworthy, but none of the journalists present, who included David Sanger of the New York Times and current Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman — said a word. Perhaps, as was common with anti-disinfo conferences, the event was off the record. (We asked, and none of the reporters commented). It doesn’t matter. Lowenthal showed how another “anti-disinformation” conference featured the headline speaker Anthony Blinken. He’s currently suspected of having “triggered” the infamous letter signed by 50 intelligence officers saying the Hunter Biden laptop story had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
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As Lowenthal writes: “See how it works? The people accusing others of “disinformation” run the biggest disinformation campaigns themselves.”
On the flip side, Orfalea found a document showing that both the Wikileaks account and that of Dr. Jill Stein were algorithmically added by Twitter to a list given the creepy name is_russian. This was one of two buckets of “Russians” Twitter was collecting, one called “A Priori Russians” (usually, accounts identified as Russian by 3rd party researchers), the other “Inferred Russians” (accounts that had “strong,” “medium,” or “weak” “signals” of Russianness, involving language, type of email account, location of IP address, tweet time, etc). Even Twitter’s own analysts noted that any system that “captured” Jill Stein as “Russian” spoke to the “overly broad nature of is_russian.” It was just such a “signals” or “marker”-based methodology that Twitter and other researchers used to identify “Russians” on the Internet, a methodology Twitter internally called one of “educated guesses,” concealing a company secret about identifying accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency: “We have no realistic way of knowing this on a Twitter-centric basis.”
As Stein noted when I spoke to her yesterday, these unseen algorithmic tweaks to the political landscape have the effect of decreasing the visibility of political independents during a time of “record hunger for political alternatives.” Stein noted a Gallup poll just showed “identification with the Democratic and Republican parties is at an all-time low,” and said such digital meddling is “an outrageous excuse for political repression,” and “more that Joe McCarthy would be proud of.”
When Stella Assange was told about the is_russian list, she first speculated that any algorithm that demerited users based on location might produce false positives if account holders used, say, the Tor Browser, which could “randomly result in an RU exit node.” Since “Tor is an essential tool for civil liberties and privacy communities,” you could have people being tossed in a “Russian” bucket for the crime of trying to evade surveillance.
In another part of his thread, Orfalea notes that a Clemson University researcher hailed as a “troll hunter” in the press and used as a source by major media outlets, speculated that an account called @drkwarlord that was sharing a hashtag, #BloombergisRacist because the account was tweeting at odd hours:
That’s the “expert” opinion. Orfalea just called @drkwarlord, who laughed, “I’m a nurse at a hospital in Indiana. In 2020, I worked the night shift.”
Whether it’s suppression of a news story conservatives care about like the Hunter Biden laptop tale, or deamplification of a left-leaning Green Party candidate like Jill Stein, the #TwitterFiles consistently hit at the same theme, but it’s not partisan. It’s really summed up by something Stella Assange said, about the difference between Wikileaks and the “anti-disinformation” facsimile, Bellingcat. “Wikileaks coined ‘intelligence agency of the people.’ Bellingcat went with ‘for the people.’”
Civil society institutions, the media, politicians, and government are supposed to maintain distance from one another in democracy. The Censorship-Industrial Complex shows an opposite instinct, for all of these groups to act in concert, essentially as one giant, incestuous intelligence operation — not of the people, but paternalistically “for” the people, or so they believe. Journalists attend conferences where news happens and do not report it, breaking ranks neither with conference organizers, nor with each other. The Trump era has birthed a new brand of paranoid politics, where once-liberalizing institutions like the press and NGOs are encouraged to absorb into a larger whole, creating a single political cartel to protect against the “contagion” of mass movements. As Lowenthal notes, this explains why so many “anti-disinformation” campaigns describe language as a kind of disease, e.g. “infodemic,” “information pollution,” and “information disorder.”
Surrounded by the “disease” of dangerous political ideas, checks and balances are being discarded in favor of a new belief in banding together. The Guardian’s Luke Harding laid out this idea a few years ago, in a gushing review of a book about Bellingcat by its founder, British journalist Eliot Higgins:
Higgins thinks traditional news outlets need to establish their own open source investigation teams or miss out. He’s right. Several have done so. The New York Times has recruited ex-Bellingcat staff. Higgins approves of this. In his view, rivalry between media titles is a thing of the past. The future is collaboration, the hunt for evidence a shared endeavour, the truth out there if we wish to discover it.
Harding makes this sound cheery, but the rivalry of media titles is the primary (if not only) regulatory mechanism for keeping the press honest. If the Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC no longer go after each other for uncorrected errors — like the Hamilton 68 fiasco exposed in the #TwitterFiles, or Harding’s own infamous report that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort managed to have a secret meeting in London’s Ecuadorian embassy with the world’s most-watched human, Assange — they can and will indulge in collective delusions. A “shared endeavour” vision of politics is just a synonym for belief in elite concentration of power.
As noted in Lowenthal’s thread, the story of the #TwitterFiles and the Censorship-Industrial Complex is “really the story of the collapse of public trust in experts and institutions, and how those experts struck back, by trying to pool their remaining influence into a political monopoly.” The losers in any advancement of this story would include anyone outside the monopoly, and they can be on either the right or the left. The intense negative reaction by traditional press to the #TwitterFiles stories published to date is rooted in a feeling of betrayal. The new media leaders see themselves as doing the same service police officers in the stop-and-frisk era called “order maintenance,” pouncing on visible signs of discord or disruption. They’re gatekeepers, and the #TwitterFiles — classic old-timey journalism that assumes the public has a right to know things — represents an unacceptable breach of the perimeter.
Orfalea is also releasing today a video he compiled for the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Titled “Eleven Minutes of Media Falsehoods, Just On One Subject, Just On One Channel,” it’s what’s left of a more ambitious plan the Racket team tried to put together as part of this wider series, whose first pieces are coming out today. Andrew and Matt’s material is coming out first, but in the next weeks you’ll be reading from a series of contributors in this “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” each looking at this subject from different angles.
The project started with a question: who’s on this list?