Tag Archives: Disinformation

Keep This in Mind When You Hear the Right Claim They’re Censored on Social Media

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It’s bullshit. From The Washington Post:

A new report calls conservative claims of social media censorship “a form of disinformation”.

[The] report concludes that social networks aren’t systematically biased against conservatives, directly contradicting Republican claims that social media companies are censoring them. 

Recent moves by Twitter and Facebook to suspend [the former president’s] accounts in the wake of the violence at the Capitol are inflaming conservatives’ attacks on Silicon Valley. But New York University researchers today released a report stating claims of anti-conservative bias are “a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.” 

The report found there is no trustworthy large-scale data to support these claims, and even anecdotal examples that tech companies are biased against conservatives “crumble under close examination.” The report’s authors said, for instance, the companies’ suspensions of [the ex-president’s] accounts were “reasonable” given his repeated violation of their terms of service — and if anything, the companies took a hands-off approach for a long time given [his] position.

The report also noted several data sets underscore the prominent place conservative influencers enjoy on social media. For instance, CrowdTangle data shows that right-leaning pages dominate the list of sources providing the most engaged-with posts containing links on Facebook. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino, for instance, far out-performed most major news organizations in the run-up to the 2020 election. 

The report also cites an October 2020 study in which Politico found “right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets, and other GOP supporters” dominated the online discussion of Black Lives Matter and election fraud, two of the biggest issues in 2020. Working with the nonpartisan think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue, researchers found users shared the most viral right-wing social media content about Black Lives Matter more than ten times as often as the most popular liberal posts on the topic. People also shared right-leaning claims on election fraud about twice as often as they shared liberals’ or traditional media outlets’ posts discussing the issue.

But even so, baseless claims of anti-conservative bias are driving Republicans’ approach to regulating tech. Republican lawmakers have concentrated their hearing exchanges with tech executives on the issue, and it’s been driving their legislative proposals. . . .

The New York University researchers called on Washington regulators to focus on what they called “the very real problems of social media.”

“Only by moving forward from these false claims can we begin to pursue that agenda in earnest,” Paul Barrett, the report’s primary author and deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights said in a statement. 

The researchers want the Biden administration to work with Congress to overhaul the tech industry. 

Their recommendations focus particularly on changing Section 230, a decades-old law shielding tech companies from lawsuits for the photos, videos and posts people share on their websites. . . . 

The researchers warn against completely repealing the law. Instead, they argue companies should only receive Section 230 immunity if they agree to accept more responsibilities in policing content such as disinformation and hate speech. The companies could be obligated to ensure their recommendation engines don’t favor sensationalist content or unreliable material just to drive better user engagement. 

“Social media companies that reject these responsibilities would forfeit Section 230’s protection and open themselves to costly litigation.” the report proposed.

The researchers also called for the creation of a new Digital Regulatory Agency, which would serve as an independent body and be tasked with enforcing a revised Section 230. 
The report also suggested Biden could empower a “special commission” to work with the industry on improving content moderation, which would be able to move much more quickly than legal battles over antitrust issues. It also called for the president to expand the task force announced by Biden on online harassment to focus on a broad range of harmful content. 

They also called for greater transparency in Silicon Valley. 

The researchers said the platforms typically don’t provide much justification for sanctioning an account or post, and when people are in the dark they assume the worst. 

“The platforms should give an easily understood explanation every time they sanction a post or account, as well as a readily available means to appeal enforcement actions,” the report said. “Greater transparency—such as that which Twitter and Facebook offered when they took action against [a certain terrible person] in January— would help to defuse claims of political bias, while clarifying the boundaries of acceptable user conduct.”

Reports from the Dystopian, Disinformation Beat

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Ben Collins is a reporter for NBC News. He says he works the “dystopian beat”. By that, he means he follows the crazies, I assume mostly the radical right. This afternoon, he shared some of what he’s found:

Over the last few years, I kept in touch with some QAnon supporters through DMs [Twitter direct messages], checking in on them to see if they’d ever come out of it when their next doomsday came and went.

They’d typically first message me calling me a Satanic pedophile. I’d ignore it and ask questions.

Usually they would draw hard lines. A big one was D5, which everyone thought would be mass arrests on December 5th two years ago. Didn’t happen, didn’t matter.

It’s about belief, anticipation, an advent calendar. One day soon, their problems would be fixed.

I would check in the week after the failed doomsdays. They’d point to a Q post like scripture, and say some ridiculous event proved it was still happening. An earthquake somewhere, a service interruption on Gmail.

I learned something: these people don’t want to be humiliated.

So many Q people have staked their entire identities on this. There are no real-life happy endings with QAnon, especially true believers. Just constant embarrassment and almost surgical extrication from friends or family.

So they retreat back to Q forums and pray for executions [executions of Q followers to confirm their fears?].

There are a lot of QAnon influencers saying the 20th is their last stand, that if Biden is inaugurated they’ll admit they’ve been conned. But they won’t. They’ll equivocate and buck-pass. They’ll find secret patterns in his speech and say he was secretly arrested [what???]. It’ll continue.

QAnon is a deeply pathetic and embarrassing thing to believe. For believers, there is safety from that embarrassment in increasingly volatile and toxic online communities. Getting people out of it safely is going to be very hard, but important.

I’d reach back out to some of those Q people, but they’re banned from this site now.

They grew to like me. I wasn’t a Satanic, blood-drinking pedophile . . . they wanted to save me.

Because, remember, they think they’re the good guys.

Unquote. Meanwhile:

Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Txxxx and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.

The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Txxxx was banned from Twitter. . . . 

The research by Zignal and other groups suggests that a powerful, integrated disinformation ecosystem — composed of high-profile influencers, rank-and-file followers and Txxxx himself — was central to pushing millions of Americans to reject the election results and may have trouble surviving without his social media accounts.

Researchers have found that Txxxx’s tweets were retweeted by supporters at a remarkable rate, no matter the subject, giving him a virtually unmatched ability to shape conversation online. . . . [The] disinformation researchers consistently have found that relatively few accounts acted as “superspreaders” during the election, with their tweets and posts generating a disproportionate share of the falsehoods and misleading narratives that spread about election fraud, mail-in ballots and other topics related to the vote [The Washington Post].

Bad News (a Long Read)

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Looking out the window in a pleasant neighborhood, you don’t see the problems. But they’re very real.

This is the headline of an article in Time written by a businessman and a former labor leader: “The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken 50 Trillion Dollars from the Bottom 90%”:

Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.

How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.

This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of [Gross Domestic Product] —enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom [90%] an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.

Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant—$50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy—$50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure. . .

At every income level up to the 90th percentile, wage earners are now being paid a fraction of what they would have had inequality held constant. . . .On average, extreme inequality is costing the median income full-time worker about $42,000 a year. Adjusted for inflation using the [Consumer Price Index], the numbers are even worse: half of all full-time workers (those at or below the median income of $50,000 a year) now earn less than half what they would have [if] incomes . . . continued to keep pace with economic growth. And that’s per worker, not per household.

The next article I read was written for the Times Literary Supplement by a Columbia University researcher. “The Rich and the Rest” is a review of three books. The first book describes how corporate America and the rich have waged a successful war on science for the past seventy years:

A succession of administrations have frayed the social safety net and dismantled regulatory controls. Corporate money has bought unprecedented influence in electoral campaigns and reaped unprecedented political power in return. In The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception, the epidemiologist David Michaels details many of the victories these corporate interests have won. Michaels, the former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the Barack Obama administration, spent years weighing the survival of workers and citizens against the short-term profits of corporations. In his book, he documents not only a shocking disregard for human welfare on the part of big business, but also a co-ordinated effort to compromise the culture of knowledge itself.

Michaels painstakingly explains the way medical researchers have documented the dangers of certain consumer products and industrial processes, beginning with smoking. . . . One early study “found that heavy smokers were fifty times as likely as non-smokers to contract lung cancer”. This was terrible news for the tobacco industry, which had burgeoned with the wartime practice (in both world wars) of issuing cigarettes to soldiers as standard rations. And so the industry responded by commissioning a public relations expert to set up a “research committee” to contest the findings. Unfortunately, the findings were solid, so the mission became the manufacture of doubt. Did tobacco use cause lung cancer? The evidence suggested that it did. Was tobacco the only cause of lung cancer? Of course not. So carcinogens like asbestos and radon became excuses for quashing public health measures concerning tobacco. Over time, an army of publicists, lawyers and corrupt scientists was assembled to prolong the public agony in the interest of squeezing every last nickel from the trade.

. . . Chapter by chapter, case by case, Michaels marches through the many ways corporate greed has co-opted science, law and government, in each case following the model set by Big Tobacco. . . .

Michaels’s book follows in the distinguished footsteps of the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, whose Merchants of Doubt (2010) described how Big Tobacco’s proxies segued into climate change denial. Once again, even when the science was near unanimous, the purveyors of fossil fuels and industrial contaminants saturated the public sphere with specious arguments and outright falsehoods. In recent years oil companies have busily diversified and invested in alternative energy, but they have simultaneously waged war against environmental regulations to maximize every bit of profit from the existing industry before they abandon it, regardless of the human cost.

The second book tells the story of the fabulously wealthy Koch family. It was Fred Koch, a chemical engineer, who saw a great opportunity during the Texas oil boom in the early 20th century:

Fred cleverly predicted that subsidiary industries such as refineries and pipelines would pave the way to great fortunes. He was more concerned with profits than with politics – he built refineries for both Stalin and Hitler – and, while a highly successful businessman, he remained a fairly ordinary oil magnate: it took his sons to transform the company into a political and economic powerhouse. As Christopher Leonard writes in Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, Charles Koch, who was made company president in 1966, despised New Deal America.

His response was to create “a political influence network that is arguably the most powerful and far-reaching operation ever run out of an American CEO’s office … Charles Koch’s political vision represents one extreme pole in the ongoing debate about the role of government in markets; a view that government should essentially protect private property and do little else”. . . .

[Charles] turned the full beam of his method to politics in 2008, when the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress began to draft policies to respond to the climate crisis, endangering fossil fuel profits.

Koch and his associates have created a political assembly line to fund, organize and publicize an opposition. His donors’ gatherings . . . have collected millions of dollars, which have then funded organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which in turn have leveraged influence-peddling among state legislators, and funded faux “grassroots” (or “astroturf”) organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity. These have orchestrated demonstrations and door-to-door canvassing during elections. Koch-funded groups have subverted language with Orwellian flair: Americans for Prosperity promotes regressive tax policies and wage suppression; the Heartland Institute promotes the despoliation of the American landscape by sowing doubt about climate and environmental hazards.

The review’s third book deals with America’s “compound epidemic of addiction, alcoholism and suicide”, an epidemic that obviously predated Covid-19:

The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton survey this tragic landscape in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Case and Deaton call this situation the dark side of meritocracy, in which “the less educated are devalued and disrespected”. In this view, the collapse of social constructs, including marriage, institutional religion and trade unions, leaves people unmoored and their interests undefended. And while the elites of the past often regarded noblesse oblige and charity as the obligations of privilege and faith, modern American meritocracy, rooted in the founding religion of Calvinism, suggests that the happy “elect” are deserving of their good fortune, and that the “losers” are simply reaping what they sow. To help them is throwing good money after bad. Better to spend it on a sports arena.

The upshot is dire. The US has the highest infant mortality rate and the lowest life expectancy among industrialized nations – a situation that the Covid-19 crisis has cast into sharp relief. The US accounts for 4 per cent of the world’s population but more than 25 per cent of global deaths from the pandemic. . . .

Nowhere are the flaws of unfettered capitalism better illustrated than in the opioid crisis (here as in Michaels’s book). It is a tragically familiar tale: a powerful pharmaceutical company creates a new market for addictive painkillers by encouraging and incentivizing doctors to record pain levels as the fifth vital sign (after temperature, pulse, respiration and blood pressure). Once this subjective symptom is recorded, the drug can be prescribed, having been falsely advertised as unlikely to lead to addiction. Billions of dollars in profit are then realized, at a dire cost: to this day millions remain addicted; more than 67,000 Americans died from overdoses in 2018 alone. In this cycle of immiseration, a dysfunctional society breeds pain, then creates a revenue stream from a treatment that infinitely compounds it.

Yet millions of voters, in particular struggling White men with high school educations, support the Republican Party, the party of big business. They have their reasons, despite the fact — revealed by the study described in that Time article — that “by far the single largest driver of rising inequality these past forty years has been the dramatic rise in inequality  between white men”. Again from the Time article:

The $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. . . . [This] upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn’t inevitable; it was a choice—a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people.

I’ll conclude this avalanche of dysfunction with a passage from a densely-written classic, Politics and Markets, by Charles Lindblom (I’m going to finish it this time). It was published, coincidentally or not, in 1976:

One obstruction to polyarchy [rule by the many] is the privileged position of businessmen [by which Lindblom means their tremendous control over the functioning of a nation’s economy]. It is a rival . . . to the polyarchal control of government [since government must induce businessmen to keep the economy going]. Another obstruction is the disproportionate influence of businessmen in interest-group, party and electoral politics. It permits businessmen to win . . . disproportionately in their many polyarchal struggles. . . But now suppose that the business influence strikes even deeper in a particular way. Consider the possibility that businessmen achieve an indoctrination of citizens so that citizens’ volitions serve not their own interests but the interests of businessmen. The privileged position of business comes to be widely accepted. In electoral politics, no great struggle need be fought [202] . . . 

. . . Despite universal suffrage, income distribution in the polyarchies [like the US and UK] has not changed greatly. . . In few of the polyarchies is there serious discussion, even among the politically active, of major alterations of the distribution of wealth and income. And citizens are extraordinarily ignorant on the issue. . . [208].

Two recent studies of British working-class attitudes and opinions agree in finding both a narrow range of opinion and widespread deference of working class to upper class — this in a society many of whose nineteenth-century leaders feared that universal suffrage would bring about demands for a more equal sharing of income and wealth, so obviously advantageous did they see such policies for the mass of voters. It is one of the world’s most extraordinary social phenomena that masses of voters vote very much like their elites. They demand very little for themselves [208-209].

Lindblom was calling attention to economic inequality before America became vastly more unequal. Now the public is more aware of inequality, but that’s because inequality is so much worse. Nevertheless, “masses of voters [continue to] vote very much like their elites”. What would the professor make of our situation in the year 2020? (I bet he’d recommend voting.)