racket | 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.”
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:
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.”
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