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How do journalists and tech platforms determine what information is verifiable online? How can news consumers determine which media outlets to trust when the line between partisan bias and disinformation becomes hazier and hazier? On today’s episode, David and Sarah are joined by Renée DiResta—a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and a writer at Wired and the Atlantic—for a conversation about disinformation online. “Anybody with a laptop can make themselves look like a media organization, can use a variety of social media marketing techniques to grow an audience, and then can push out whatever they want to say to that audience,” DiResta warns. Where do we go from here? Tune in to learn about journalistic ethics surrounding the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story and what to expect from disinformation actors this election cycle.
Show Notes:
-“Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm” by Emma Jo-Morris Gabriel Fonrouge in the New York Post, “The Conspiracies Are Coming From Inside the House” by Renée DiResta
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Very informative, thanks y’all. Don’t worry Sarah, one type of dinosaur did make it: birds. Know where I learned that? Advisory Opinions
This was an excellent podcast. Thank you. One minor caveat is that it seemed to focus, as if often the case with academics and to borrow from Jonah, on a particular part of the elephant, suggesting that the issue is all trunk. Having domestic providers of disinformation is not new, although this wave is somewhat different (each new era brings new forms of Russian horror).
When Putin was pushing conspiracy theories about AIDS and other things into African American communities, there were a lot of what we would now call Hoteps pushing the same sort of stuff; if you’re interested in it, check out the NOI’s newspaper, which is still kind of amazing today. It’s great for the Russians when they can form their own pawn communities in America, but it’s even better for them when they find Americans who already want to spread the message the Kremlin wants, whether that’s Murray Rothbard wrenching the Libertarian Party from the Koch’s anti-communist platform to a moral equivalence, objectively pro-Soviet position, Civil Rights groups focused on educating Americans about the horrors of anti-black racism (or homophobia, papophobia, or whatever the group that particular Kremlin task force was victimizing by alienating them from America or by encouraging Americans to alienate them).
So, while direct Russian action of the sort DiResta focuses on is important, suborned American institutions are also pretty vital. Via Paul Manafort, for instance, Putin was able to get one of the most widely read, most trusted and most famously principled sources on the right (although I think Breitbart might have been just number two in readership at that point), Ben Shapiro, to publish obvious falsehoods about Ukraine, smearing opposition to Putin as anti-Semitic ( https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2012/10/29/clinton-ukraine-tymoshenko-anti-semitism/ ), which was a charge that had been made elsewhere, and claiming that Tymoshenko and Yanukovych were equivalent from Putin’s perspective, which is not a claim made by any other person not in the direct pay of the Kremlin, for obvious reasons if you know anything about Tymoshenko’s lifelong struggle against Russia and Yanukovych’s long history of subservience, which culminated in his current Russian residency ( https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2012/10/22/obama-ukraine-yanukovych/ ). Breitbart was, under Shapiro’s editorship, an organ that liked Cruz as much as Trump, but as Shapiro began to split with them turned more towards Trump. It became highly enthusiastic in its support of the now President, affirming him under almost all circumstances, but it nonetheless consistently turned on Trump when Trump got crosswise with Putin.
We have influence peddling admitted to in Manafort’s criminal confession, but for most Breitbart articles we don’t have a suggestion of direct Russian involvement. It’s an American institution that has found support for the Kremlin to be incredibly profitable. Analogously, when libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie said that he had thought that people who voted for libertarians like himself and Rand Paul were principled libertarians, but adjusted this on seeing the demographic predominantly voting for Trump to them seeking the 'craziest son of a bitch in the race'; politically “crazy” people, in the sense of the people most likely to distrust mainstream media sources (not saying that this is the definition, saying that this is a very strong correlation) have always been the most vulnerable to Russian provision of alternative media sources designed to appeal to their factional preoccupations. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rep-massies-theory-voters-who-voted-for-libertarians-and-then-trump-were-always-just-seeking-the-craziest-son-of-a-bitch-in-the-race They’re Americans, and they’re not working for the Kremlin, but their interest was in finding media that would help explain the world to them as they saw it, primarily in terms of entrenched elites betraying or openly oppressing conservatives (depending on political party), so they found and supported media that back the conspiracy theories they want. One America News, likewise, doesn’t appear to me to be a Russian front, but often finds it useful to publish open Russian (or sometimes Chinese) propaganda, because sometimes propaganda is well made, meaning that it is effectively designed to be appealing to OAN. And when you regularly publish repackaged RT material, you have a pretty strong incentive for the rest of your content to form a coherent picture with it.
But it’s not just the fringes. There are Russian owned semi-respectable newspapers that find themselves to be the most widely linked sources on Middle Eastern News (the UK based Independent being the most prominent), and Reuters is now in formal partnership with state run outlet TASS, leading it to publish stories about how great life is under Assad during the Civil War (apparently salsa dancing is flourishing).
And there’s the politicians and activists, the think tanks and the journalists, such that even organs that aren’t suborned themselves will often carry content by someone who is. And there’s the good faith journalists who find themselves in an ideological pool that provides them with awful content; I remember listening to a BBC broadcast early in the Syrian Civil War that both contained the news that the FSA was already adequately armed and did not need Western support, and also that they had been attempting to import fireworks as improvised weapons. We occasionally find a case of blackmail and crude compulsion (we find a lot more as time passes and archives become available), but for the most part the content is provided by people who really believe that we should think less of America today because it is too left wing, too right wing, too dominated by left and right, too dominated by white people, too governed by lizard people, or whatever the issue is, and are happy to be guided by more hits, more pay, more praise etc., to have their story denouncing Republicans, Democrats, the Two Party System, African Americans, or whatever it is falling in line with preferred Kremlin stories.
And there’s the hacks. Along with the creation of facts on the ground (creating and weaponizing the Syrian refugee wave remains Putin’s most successful strategy for empowering radicals on left and right that reduce European opposition to him), this in some ways relatively traditional form of espionage is critical to empowering news organizations that will run with Kremlin news stories, while empowering the sort of critiques that can be defended by Rev Snow’s responses. Edward Snowden didn’t publish false things when he told the Taliban which Afghans they should murder for the crimes of pursuing education for young girls. Glenn Greenwald isn’t unusually dishonest. But they nonetheless work effectively to promote Russian state interests, uncovering the secrets of those the FSB opposes while leaving opaque the curtains of those the FSB protects.
And each one of those elements serves as a force multiplier to all the others. If you’re not seeing the multi-billion dollar elephant as a whole, you’re not going to understand why racial healing is so hard, why our politics are so polarized, why support for Ukraine is so meager, why third parties are so successful in their messaging, why conspiracy theories are flourishing and so on.
I mean, you should read David’s book, too. There are domestic dynamics at work as well. But you really need both, just as was true in the 1960s and 1970s, the last time our politics took on this hue.