Disinformation and the Intercept

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.

The meta-view from meta-nowhere

Pseudo-objectivity about pseudo-objectivity

Jay Rosen coined popularised the phrase “the view from nowhere” (originally due to Thomas Nagel) to describe the default stance of political journalism in the US and elsewhere, often defended as “objectivity”. This is closely linked to the concept of the Overton window, which I wrote about recently in relation to the AUKUS nuclear subs deal

In essence, the “view from nowhere” amounts to treating all positions within the Overton window as equally valid, and providing neutral reportage about them. This may consist of repeating the arguments of their proponents, along the lines “the earth is spherical as can be seen from space” vs “who are you going to believe: a bunch of NASA scientists, or your own common sense, which tells you that it’s flat”. The second mode is “horse-race” commentary on the relative chances of the Flat-earth and Round-earth parties in political contests”. Views from outside the Overton window, such as “oblate spheroid” are simply ignored.

Now we have, in the Washington Post, an objective article about objectivity, by former editor Martin Baron. Baron spends a bit over 3000 words canvassing a wide range of views about objectivity. In the end, he decides it’s a good thing, but never brings himself to actually say what it is supposed to be.

Baron walks up to the edge of the question when he says

“many journalists have concluded that our profession has failed miserably to fulfill its responsibilities at a perilous moment in history. Their evidence is that Donald Trump got elected in the first place, despite his lies, nativism, brutishness and racist and misogynistic language;”

but never confronts the crucial fact that neither the Washington Post nor any other major newspaper ever ran a news story saying “Trump lies” or “Trump is a racist and misogynist” (even now he can’t quite bring himself to actually say the second, just that Trump used “racist and misogynistic language”).

So, was the refusal to state the truth about Trump in plain words a failure of journalistic objectivity or a perfect example of it?

At the end of this long, long article, we are none the wiser. But, at least every viewpoint within the Overton window {1} has been given an airing.

fn1. though not, for example, the view that this is what you would expect from capitalist media companies