{"id":234251,"date":"2023-05-01T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2023-05-01T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=234251"},"modified":"2023-04-28T06:08:42","modified_gmt":"2023-04-28T05:08:42","slug":"report-on-the-censorship-industrial-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/05\/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction to a series of features about the new global speech-policing bureaucracy, uncovered in the Twitter Files and beyond.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\n25 Apr 2023 – <\/em>Today you\u2019ll find two new #TwitterFiles threads out, one<\/a> by longtime Racket contributor Matt Orfalea, and another<\/a> 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\u2019re now calling \u201cThe Censorship-Industrial Complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two new threads collectively show the wide political range of revelations in the #TwitterFiles material, which have been slandered \u2014 absurdly \u2014 as a partisan exercise. Lowenthal, who in his \u201cInsider\u2019s Guide to \u2018Anti-Disinformation\u2019\u201d describes himself as a \u201cprogressive-minded Australian,\u201d printed a series of exchanges between journalists who attended a summer \u201ctabletop exercise\u201d 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 <\/em>and current Rolling Stone <\/em>editor Noah Schactman \u2014 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\u2019t matter. Lowenthal showed how another \u201canti-disinformation\u201d conference featured the headline speaker Anthony Blinken. He\u2019s currently suspected of having \u201ctriggered\u201d the infamous letter signed by 50 intelligence officers saying the Hunter Biden laptop story had the \u201cclassic earmarks of a Russian information operation.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Lowenthal writes: \u201cSee how it works? The people accusing others of \u201cdisinformation\u201d run<\/em> the biggest disinformation campaigns themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. This was one of two buckets of \u201cRussians\u201d Twitter was collecting, one called \u201cA Priori Russians\u201d (usually, accounts identified as Russian by 3rd party researchers), the other \u201cInferred Russians\u201d (accounts that had \u201cstrong,\u201d \u201cmedium,\u201d or \u201cweak\u201d \u201csignals\u201d of Russianness, involving language, type of email account, location of IP address, tweet time, etc). Even Twitter\u2019s own analysts noted that any system that \u201ccaptured\u201d Jill Stein as \u201cRussian\u201d spoke to the \u201coverly broad nature of is_russian.\u201d It was just such a \u201csignals\u201d or \u201cmarker\u201d-based methodology that Twitter and other researchers used to identify \u201cRussians\u201d on the Internet, a methodology Twitter internally called one of \u201ceducated guesses,\u201d concealing a company secret about identifying accounts linked to Russia\u2019s Internet Research Agency: \u201cWe have no realistic way of knowing this on a Twitter-centric basis.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201crecord hunger for political alternatives.\u201d Stein noted a Gallup poll just showed<\/a> \u201cidentification with the Democratic and Republican parties is at an all-time low,\u201d and said such digital meddling is \u201can outrageous excuse for political repression,\u201d and \u201cmore that Joe McCarthy would be proud of.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201crandomly result in an RU exit node.\u201d Since \u201cTor is an essential tool for civil liberties and privacy communities,\u201d you could have people being tossed in a \u201cRussian\u201d bucket for the crime of trying to evade surveillance.<\/p>\n

In another part of his thread, Orfalea notes that a Clemson University researcher hailed as a \u201ctroll hunter\u201d 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:<\/p>\n

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That\u2019s the \u201cexpert\u201d opinion. Orfalea just called @drkwarlord, who laughed, \u201cI\u2019m a nurse at a hospital in Indiana. In 2020, I worked the night shift.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s 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\u2019s not partisan. It\u2019s really summed up by something Stella Assange said, about the difference between Wikileaks and the \u201canti-disinformation\u201d facsimile, Bellingcat. \u201cWikileaks coined \u2018intelligence agency of the people.\u2019 Bellingcat went with \u2018for the people.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 not of the people, but paternalistically \u201cfor\u201d 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 \u201ccontagion\u201d of mass movements. As Lowenthal notes, this explains why so many \u201canti-disinformation\u201d campaigns describe language as a kind of disease, e.g. \u201cinfodemic,\u201d \u201cinformation pollution,\u201d and \u201cinformation disorder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Surrounded by the \u201cdisease\u201d of dangerous political ideas, checks and balances are being discarded in favor of a new belief in banding together. The Guardian\u2019s<\/em> Luke Harding laid out this idea a few years ago, in a gushing review<\/a> of a book about Bellingcat by its founder, British journalist Eliot Higgins:<\/p>\n

Higgins thinks traditional news outlets need to establish their own open source investigation teams or miss out. He\u2019s 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<\/strong>. The future is collaboration, the hunt for evidence a shared endeavour, the truth out there if we wish to discover it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em>, CNN, and MSNBC no longer go after each other for uncorrected errors \u2014 like the Hamilton 68 fiasco exposed in the #TwitterFiles, or Harding\u2019s own infamous report that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort managed to have a secret meeting in London\u2019s Ecuadorian embassy with the world\u2019s most-watched human, Assange \u2014 they can and will indulge in collective delusions. A \u201cshared endeavour\u201d vision of politics is just a synonym for belief in elite concentration of power.<\/p>\n

As noted in Lowenthal\u2019s thread, the story of the #TwitterFiles and the Censorship-Industrial Complex is \u201creally 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.\u201d 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 \u201corder maintenance,\u201d pouncing on visible signs of discord or disruption. They\u2019re gatekeepers, and the #TwitterFiles \u2014 classic old-timey journalism that assumes the public has a right to know things \u2014 represents an unacceptable breach of the perimeter.<\/p>\n

Orfalea is also releasing today a video he compiled for the \u201cReport on the Censorship-Industrial Complex.\u201d Titled \u201cEleven Minutes of Media Falsehoods, Just On One Subject, Just On One Channel,\u201d it\u2019s what\u2019s left of a more ambitious plan the Racket <\/em>team tried to put together as part of this wider series, whose first pieces are coming out today. Andrew and Matt\u2019s material is coming out first, but in the next weeks you\u2019ll be reading from a series of contributors in this \u201cReport on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,\u201d each looking at this subject from different angles.<\/p>\n

The project started with a question: who\u2019s on this list?<\/p>\n

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You\u2019re looking at page 7 of a report<\/a> by the State Department Inspector General from August, 2020, featuring the forgettable title, \u201cAudit of Global Engagement Center Federal Assistance Award Management and Monitoring.\u201d On the first page, the State IG explained it was auditing a new agency, the Global Engagement Center, which was housed in the U.S. State Department and dedicated to the fight against \u201cforeign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation.\u201d The IG added some history:<\/p>\n

In March 2016, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13721, which required the Secretary of State to establish the Global Engagement Center (GEC). The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2017 then mandated that GEC \u201clead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The report went on to say that in Fiscal Year 2018, the new anti-disinformation wing of the State Department received $98.7 million, including \u201capproximately $78.7 million in congressionally appropriated funds, and $20 million transferred from the Department of Defense.\u201d That was distributed among 39 different award recipients, whom the Inspector General was kind enough to list. Only, they redacted all but three names, none of which have what one would describe as vibrant online presences today: Park Advisors<\/a>, the Democracy Council of California, and the CNA Corporation.<\/p>\n

I first read this report in mid-February, roughly three months into the #TwitterFiles project. At the time, I was trying to learn more about Hamilton 68<\/a>, the reporter-friendly anti-disinformation \u201cdashboard\u201d purporting to track a list of accounts linked to \u201cRussian influence activities.\u201d Internal Twitter emails showed executives reverse-engineered the Hamilton list and found it to be a fraud<\/a>, mostly tracking not Russians but ordinary people here at home.<\/p>\n

Multiple sources told me to look for Hamilton ties to the GEC. Among those who claimed to help design the site included a writer called J.M. Berger, who told me he\u2019d been on the GEC payroll until about a month before the list\u2019s launch (though he vigorously denied doing work on Hamilton for GEC). Hamilton\u2019s public spokesperson Clint Watts, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, worked at GEC\u2019s predecessor agency, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, or CSCC. The first head of GEC, former Time<\/em> editor Rick Stengel, lauded<\/a> the Hamilton 68 project in odd language, saying, \u201cIf only we\u2019d had it during the election\u201d:<\/p>\n

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Trying to answer these questions about a relatively small amount of money and 39 names, I soon realized the \u201canti-disinformation\u201d world was awash in cash from a range of public and private sources, and we weren\u2019t dealing with dozens of organizations but at least<\/em> hundreds, many engaged in language-policing at scale. By early February, seeing that keeping track of which group did what was clearly too much work for one person to even begin to take on, I put out an APB<\/a> for help mainly in trying to answer one question: exactly how big is this new speech bureaucracy?<\/p>\n

#TwitterFiles reporters like Michael Shellenberger, and myself didn\u2019t have much of a hint of what we were looking at until later in the project. That larger story was about a new type of political control mechanism that didn\u2019t really exist ten years ago. In preparation for testimony before the House in March, Shellenberger gave it a name: the Censorship-Industrial Complex.<\/p>\n

The allusion was an unpleasantly perfect fit. America was introduced to the original Military-Industrial Complex on January 17, 1961, in the farewell address of President Dwight Eisenhower. The former Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in WWII warned of something \u201cnew in the American experience\u201d: an interlocking network of financiers, extra-governmental organizations and official bureaucracies who were organized around permanent arms production and who collectively wielded more power than kings, presidents, and other such titular authorities.<\/p>\n

Ike forced Americans for the first time to think of power as suffuse, insuperable, and geographically indistinct, less like a king\u2019s scepter than electricity running through a brain. In the context of the Military Industrial Complex, the Oval Office from which Eisenhower delivered his famous farewell was just a room, Eisenhower himself just a recoiling pile of bones and fluids, following a final stage direction:<\/p>\n

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