{"id":230730,"date":"2023-03-06T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=230730"},"modified":"2023-03-04T04:43:34","modified_gmt":"2023-03-04T04:43:34","slug":"twitter-files-gec-new-knowledge-and-state-sponsored-blacklists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/03\/twitter-files-gec-new-knowledge-and-state-sponsored-blacklists\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Files\u2014GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists"},"content":{"rendered":"

North Americans have been paying taxes to disenfranchise themselves, as government agencies and subcontractors undertake a massive digital blacklisting project.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

2 Mar 2023 – <\/em>A new #TwitterFiles thread will be dropping in a few hours, at noon EST. It follows up the\u00a0Hamilton 68 story of a month ago<\/a>\u00a0with examples of state-funded digital blacklisting campaigns run amok. It\u2019s self-explanatory, but some advance context might help:<\/p>\n

In 2015-2016, during the brief, forgotten period when Islamic terrorism was fading as a national obsession and Trumpian \u201cdomestic extremism\u201d had not yet become one, Barack Obama made a series of decisions that may yet prove devastating to his legacy.<\/p>\n

The short version is he signed\u00a0Executive Order 13271<\/a>, establishing a \u201cGlobal Engagement Center<\/a>\u201d (\u201cGEC\u201d) to \u201ccounter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.\u201d This act got almost no press and even within government, almost no one noticed.<\/p>\n

In the bigger picture, however, a lame duck president kick-started the process of shifting the national security establishment\u2019s focus from counterterrorism to \u201cdisinformation.\u201d Whether by malfunction or design, this abrupt course change of Washington\u2019s contracting supertanker would have dramatic consequences. In fact, the tale of how America\u2019s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against \u201cthreats\u201d in our own population, might someday be remembered as the story of our time, with collective panic over \u201cdisinfo\u201d defining this generation in much the same way the Red Scare defined the culture of the fifties.<\/p>\n

This is a complicated story and it would be a mistake to jump to simplistic conclusions, like that the Global Engagement Center (humorously nicknamed \u201cGECK\u201d or \u201cYUCK\u201d by detractors in other agencies) is an evil Orwellian mind-control scheme. It isn\u2019t. But for a few crucial bad decisions, it could have fulfilled a useful or at least logical mission, much as the United States Information Agency (USIA) once did. However, instead of stressing research and public reports, as the USIA did when\u00a0responding to Soviet accusations that Americans had caused the AIDS crisis<\/a>, GEC funded a secret list of contractors and employed a more surreptitious approach to \u201ccounter-disinformation,\u201d sending companies like Twitter voluminous reports on foreign \u201cecosystems\u201d \u2014 in practice, blacklists.<\/p>\n

GEC was not conceived as a partisan mechanism to defang conservative media, despite the recent true and damning series of\u00a0reports by the\u00a0<\/a>Washington Examiner<\/a><\/em>, outlining how a GEC-funded NGO in England used algorithmic scoring to de-rank outlets like\u00a0The Daily Wire\u00a0<\/em>and help papers like the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>earn more ad revenue. The blacklisting tales you\u2019ll be reading about later today on Twitter also primarily target American conservatives, though GEC and GEC-funded contractors also target left-friendly movements like the\u00a0gilets jaunes\u00a0<\/em>(yellow vests),\u00a0<\/em>socialist media outlets like Canada\u2019s\u00a0Global Research<\/a><\/em>, even the Free Palestine movement.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Some of the Original Interagency Partners for the Global Engagement Center That Would Be Housed within the US State Department<\/p><\/div>\n

The scary angle on GEC is not so much the agency as the sprawling infrastructure of \u201cdisinformation labs\u201d that have grown around it.<\/p>\n

Underneath America\u2019s love affair with \u201canti-disinformation\u201d in the Trump years \u2014 which expressed itself in the seemingly instant construction of a sprawling complex of disinformation studies \u201clabs\u201d at institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Clemson, UT, Pitt, William and Mary, the University of Washington, and other locations \u2014 lay a devastating secret. Most of these \u201cexperts\u201d know nothing. Many have skill, if you can call mesmerizing dumb reporters a skill, but in the area of identifying true bad actors, few know more than the average person on the street.<\/p>\n

This is described repeatedly in the #TwitterFiles. In one sequence Twitter was contacted by Sheera Frenkel of the\u00a0New York Times,\u00a0<\/em>who was writing a hagiographic profiles of \u201cdisinformation\u201d warrior Renee DiResta, who\u2019d achieved some renown as a campaigner against vaccine misinformation. Frenkel wrote Twitter to ask why they hadn\u2019t hired \u201cindependent researchers\u201d like DiResta, Jonathan Albright, and Jonathon Morgan \u2014 coincidentally, all hired witnesses of the Senate Intelligence Committee \u2014 to help Twitter \u201cbetter understand\u201d its own business.<\/p>\n

At the sight of Frenkel\u2019s provocative note, some Twitter execs lost it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word \u2018researcher\u2019 has taken on a very broad meaning,\u201d snapped Nick Pickles. \u201cRenee is literally doing this as a hobby\u2026 Of those three only [Albright] is the most credible, but\u2026 the bulk of his work is Medium blogs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike CVE before it, misinformation is becoming a cottage industry,\u201d agreed comms official Ian Plunkett, referencing \u201ccountering violent extremism,\u201d a.k.a. counterterrorism.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s thread among other things will detail crude digital blacklisting schemes dreamed up by this new cottage industry. Each features the same design \u201cflaw,\u201d in which giant lists of supposed foreign disinformationists somehow also come to include ordinary Americans, often with the same political leanings.<\/p>\n

In one ridiculous case, the Atlantic Council\u2019s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), a GEC-funded entity, sent Twitter a huge list of people they suspected of \u201cengaging in inauthentic behavior\u2026 and Hindu nationalism more broadly.\u201d You\u2019ll see the list to judge. As was the case with the \u201cHamilton 68\u201d story, in which a spook-laden think tank purported to track accounts linked to \u201cRussian influence activities\u201d while really following the likes of @TrumpDyke and @TimeForTrumppp, this DFRLab list of \u201cHindu nationalists\u201d is weirdly packed with real septuagenarian Trump supporters.<\/p>\n

One, a woman named Marysel Urbanik who immigrated from Castro\u2019s Cuba in her youth, struggled to understand why a Washington think tank had sent Twitter a letter ID\u2019ing her as either \u201cinauthentic\u201d or a Hindu nationalist.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey say I\u2019m what?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA Hindu nationalist,\u201d I said. \u201cWell, suspected.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I\u2019m Cuban, not Indian,\u201d she pleaded, confused. \u201cHindu? I wouldn\u2019t even know what words to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such listmakers are either employing extremely expansive definitions of hate speech, extremely inexact methods of identifying spam, or they\u2019re doing both in addition to a third thing: keeping up a busywork campaign for underemployed ex-anti-terror warriors, who don\u2019t mind racking up lists of \u201cforeign\u201d disinformationists that just happen to also rope in domestic undesirables.<\/p>\n

In his book\u00a0Information Wars<\/em>, the original nominal head of GEC and former\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/em>editor Rick Stengel explained an epiphany he had that allowed him to tie the fight against \u201cforeign\u201d disinformation to matters domestic. It happened when Stengel watched a YouTube video of Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin:<\/p>\n

He castigated Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign as a bunch of \u2018\u201cstorm troopers.\u201d He lambasted what he called the American \u201cobsession with the fake Russian threat.\u201d He said it was an excuse for losers\u2026 The production values were poor, the audience was small, but the video revealed an extraordinary mirroring of language and ideas between Dugin and other Russian voices and candidate Trump\u2026 The notion that there was some kind of shared rhetorical playbook just seemed too fanciful to believe. While the messages did not exactly repeat each other, they certainly rhymed.<\/em><\/p>\n

At the same time as Dugin was uploading his video, according to public U.S. intelligence, the GRU\u2014the Russian military intelligence service\u2014began going through the email accounts of DNC officials\u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Stengel didn\u2019t need to prove an actual link between Dugin, Russia, and Trump. It was enough to imply it, by placing stories about the GRU near Trump\u2019s name, while asserting Trump and Dugin\u2019s ideas \u201crhymed.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is probably what\u2019s going on in the DFRLab list: one assumes many BJP supporters have views that \u201crhyme\u201d with what one might call the American version of nationalism, #MAGA. Similarly, a GEC report sent to Twitter about \u201cRussian Pillars of Disinformation\u201d stressed that even actors who \u201cgenerate their own momentum\u201d online should be considered part of a propaganda \u201cecosystem.\u201d Independence, the GEC report stressed, should not \u201cconfuse those trying to discern the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twitter\u2019s complaints against agencies like GEC and projects like the India list dovetail with what current and former intelligence sources have been calling in to comment on, since the first Twitter Files reports: that though sophisticated methods for detecting true bad actors exist, virtually none of the high-profile \u201cexperts\u201d employ those.<\/p>\n

Instead, methodologies are often openly absurd. List #1 might target everyone who follows more than one Chinese diplomat on Twitter. List #2 might rope in everyone who\u2019s retweeted a \u201cPeter Douche\u201d video or a \u201cFree Palestine\u201d meme made in Iran. One former GEC staffer laughs about how experts win over the media with impressive-looking \u201chairball\u201d charts that nearly always come down to some sort of volume or affinity analysis: who retweets whom, whose ideas \u201crhyme\u201d with whose, etc.<\/p>\n

In a key email, Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth is asked in an internal\u00a0<\/em>Q&A if outside researchers can really detect \u201cRussian fingerprints\u201d just by looking at Twitter\u2019s public data.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn short, no,\u201d he said, adding that it was really only possible to make \u201cinferences.\u201d<\/p>\n

But inferences are enough, for the innumerable \u201cCenters for Countering Whatever\u201d whose real goals may involve deplatforming or disenfranchising domestic groups deemed unworthy of sharing the full benefits of Western civil society (like the unmolested use of PayPal, GoFundMe, Twitter, etc.). With an inference, you can smear, and with a smear, you can do damage.<\/p>\n

The Hamilton 68 scam in this sense was perfect. It used digital alchemy to create streams of news stories tying ordinary Americans to \u201cforeign\u201d disinformation. With headlines like CNN\u2019s \u201cRussian bots are using #WalkAway to try to wound Dems in midterms<\/a>\u201d in hand, a \u201cDisinfo Lab\u201d or a noble journalistic enterprise like the \u201cextremism\u201d desk at\u00a0USA Today\u00a0<\/em>can finish the important work of calling up strings of Internet companies to \u201cask\u201d why this or that person is still allowed to use credit cards, advertise on Amazon, etc.<\/p>\n

What organizations like GEC and subcontractors like DFRLab do are just subtler versions of those same schemes. They make lists and let the increasingly sophisticated machinery of digital deprivation do the rest. It\u2019s bad enough when this dubious activity is private. But paying taxes for the pleasure? This supertanker needs turning around.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Matthew C. Taibbi is a U.S. author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for <\/em>Rolling Stone, author of several books, a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary<\/em>, co-host of <\/em>Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on <\/em>Substack.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Global Engagement Center: North Americans have been paying taxes to disenfranchise themselves, as government agencies and subcontractors undertake a massive digital blacklisting project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":230731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,2200,70],"class_list":["post-230730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-us-empire","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230730"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":230737,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230730\/revisions\/230737"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}