#Twitter Files

[chawsl]

Trial of twitter files.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:

Imagine you have earned science, engineering and business degrees from MIT and Oxford. You are interested in climate and sustainability, and so you choose to work for government. at the U.S. International Finance Corporation, as the Director of Climate Diversification. You are paid $172,000 per year, which is not bad, but likely much less than you could earn in the private sector. And then Elon Musk, whom President-elect Trump has tapped to run the Department of Government Efficiency, says that you have a fake job, boosting a tweet from an anonymous right-wing poster that says you should be fired. You have never met Musk. He has no idea what your job entails or whether you are good at it. The most likely reason he decided your job has no value is that “diversification” is in your job title, and Musk is too lazy to figure out that “diversification” and “diversity” are different things.

Ashley Thomas, the government employee in question, does technical work on how to make agriculture more robust under conditions of extreme weather. This seems like pretty important, with a classic public goods justification — the government is trying to figure out and share solutions to a problem that affects lots of people, and for which the market is unlikely to generate a solution by itself. But of course none of this matters if you are fundamentally incurious about what government does, and absolutely sure that you know better. That combination of ignorance and certainty is generally a bad condition for democracies, but a disaster when it characterizes whose who govern us. To give a sense of scale, 33 million people saw Musk’s post. Ashley Thomas has since made her social media accounts private after the wave of online harassment from Musk’s followers. She is one of an increasing number of public officials who are learning that bullying and intimidation is part of the game plan for how the right governs now. She might reasonably infer that she will be fired from her job for no reason other than the fact that one of Trump’s courtiers wants to show that he can follow through on his threats.

[...]

Outsourcing Public Sector Reform to People Who Hate the Public Sector

Of course, Musk is the one holding a fake job, since there is no real Department of Government Efficiency. In fact, we don’t really know what form his group will take. The obvious answer is that Muskawamy would serve as a Federal Advisory Committee, which is a standard way to structure input from outside advisors. But perhaps not. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy say: “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons.”

The problem with Federal Advisory Committees is that they must follow some basic transparency rules about how they operate. A shared belief between Musk and Trump is: “Transparency for thee, but not for me.” After railing against the corrupt deep state for years, Trump is refusing to explain who is funding his transition operation, a break with existing norms. Musk released “the Twitter files” to portray a (massively exaggerated) case that the website was co-operating too closely with the government. Now that he and his website helped to elect Trump and implement his policies, he has no problem with such close coordination. As Mike Masnick pointed out “Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping.”

The Federal Advisory Committee Act has some persnickety language requiring fair balance and minimizing conflicts of interest, values that again do not score highly in the Trump or Musk worldview. Trump also saw some commissions he formed delayed and halted because they failed to follow these legal requirements, such as fair balance on a commission on law enforcement. Trump even issued an Executive Order to cut the number of number of Federal Advisory Committees in his first term. For all of the above reasons I am increasingly skeptical that Muskawamy will operate under any kind of federal oversight or supervision.1 Instead, it will be an unofficial working group feeding ideas to the White House and Congress. Trump’s head of OMB, Russell Vought, has declared he will work with Muskawamy. But the Federal Advisory Committee Act is also supposed to extend to outside actors that agencies communicate with to avoid the type of shell game that Muskawamy seem to be pursuing. In other words, if Muskawamy are acting like a Federal Advisory Committee, they can be sued as if they are such a Committee, regardless of what they call themselves.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s DOGE is nothing more than fake job pretending to a real cabinet agency.

[theculturedmarxist]

The Tumblr Files

Tumblr has a habit of disappearing blogs that it seems to find objectionable. Alas, if only they were full of reactionary content they'd probably have been allowed to stay, but instead they're Leftists of various stripes, which makes them uncomfortable for the owners of Tumblr at best and dangerous at worst.

Regardless of what you think of Musk's purchase of Twitter, one good thing that came out of it was the release of the Twitter Files. Therein we learned of just how closely social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have integrated with the US government and its spying agencies.

Does the FBI have a direct line to TumblrHQ? I can't say for certain. I haven't seen any evidence of it yet, but Tumblr is a massive platform with a lot of reach. Its size alone makes it a prime target for surveillance if only because were the community left to its own devices it might start to develop its own ideas about how the world worked contrary to the bourgeois narrative, or what the US government currently calls "misinformation."

Some things to consider:

First, in the wake of the Democrats' 2016 presidential loss, the Professional-Managerial Class which make up its primary constituencies freaked out. The development of Russiagate was the response. This wasn't just about Trump winning the presidency though. The source of bourgeois terror was that the internet was an unregulated source of information, and people were starting to get the "wrong" ideas, as evidenced by Bernie Sanders immense popularity at the time, and Trump's victory.

Second, Russiagate triggered a concerted spy agency response to root out basically nonexistent "Russian influence" on social media "promoting misinformation." Pressure was put onto SM companies to "do something about Russian election meddling." Twitter's internal research found that there was basically nothing of the kind. This was the wrong answer, so Twitter was compelled by propaganda outlets and the threat of expensive legislation to "do something," and that something was to basically turn over its moderation process to US spy agencies.

30.“REPORTERS NOW KNOW THIS IS A MODEL THAT WORKS” This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement. 31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture. In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.” Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” 32.Twitter let the “USIC” into its moderation process. It would not leave. Wrote Crowell, in an email to the company’s leaders: “We will not be reverting to the status quo.”

Why is this relevant to Tumblr? Because it has a large, influential community, which alone would necessitate its surveillance if not control, but especially because Tumblr is hemorrhaging money and is failing to gain ground against its competitors.

TechCrunch reported that CEO Matt Mullenweg spilled the beans during the Q&A, which was cohosted by COO Zandy Ring and attended by a meager 800 users, despite being plastered across every Tumblr account’s dashboard. According to Mullenweg, the platform is spending $30 million more than it’s making as it tries to desperately cling to relevance in its fight against Instagram and TikTok. Moreover, COO Ring explained that the platform is not seeing much of an increase in its userbase.

“People have this impression that we have massive growth right now, and we really don’t,” Ring said during the Q&A.

None of this necessarily means that it's Langley that's getting Leftist users booted off the platform. It could merely be personal biases on the part of the staff, against transsexuals, against pro-Palestinian activists. It does seem arbitrary and capricious enough. If the goal was, say, combating antisemitism by banning pro-Palestinian users, would there be so many fascists and outright Nazis on tumblr? Why does it seem like the majority of those that get banned just happen to be on the side which opposes imperialist Western narratives?

In any case, this markedly underscores that if the Western Left wants any hope of surviving on the web, it can't rely on corporate resources to do so.

[thisisabernieblog]

This may be one of Lee Camp's best episodes, as it covers the #TwitterFiles and the censorship by the US government, gangs in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and the Washington Post actually covering Israeli war crimes! With the addition of Mexican President AMLO calling the US an oligarchy.

@lordandgodoftheobvious @brendanicus @apas-95 @petalsbleedingbeak @cavern-creature @missedthestartgun @whatevergreen @dicknouget @definitely-ellie @reinforced-fear-be-damned @they-will-not-contain-us

[yeahiwasintheshit]

Mehdi Hasan makes Elon musk’s bitch boy Matt taibbi look like the right wing lackey fool he is. Mehdi completely destroys this idiot, in a way christopher hitchens would be proud lol

[noturtlesoup17]

Whoa! Personal direct access! Someone tell Taibbi!

[macmanx]

If you’ll give me a moment to be candid, this is all just incredibly embarrassing for Musk, if he’s capable of feeling shame. (For the record, I’d guess yes.) The man made free speech his brand, saying that he wants to make Twitter a “trusted digital town square, where a wide range of views are tolerated, provided people don’t break the law or spam.” And then he cracks down on another company because it added a feature that’s a bit like Twitter?

To be clear, this is somewhat consistent behavior from Musk. The free speech promises were always puffery, and that’s been clear ever since that hot minute in December when Twitter went nuclear on links to other social media sites like Mastodon, Instagram, and Facebook.

[porterdavis]

[jloisse]

Là clairement ils ne rigolent plus du tout aux USA

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Renee DiResta at The UnPopulist:

The Russians—and Iranians—did indeed play at being disgruntled Americans during that race. But in 2020, the accounts that most persistently and effectively worked to delegitimize the American presidential election belonged to the sitting president of the United States and his inner circle. For months, a cluster of campaign surrogates, ideologically-aligned influencers, and hyper-partisan media steadily beat the drum of “The Steal.” Therefore, EIP found itself in the unexpected position of assessing not voting “misinformation” so much as an expansive and deliberate propaganda campaign that managed to persuade its adherents that a free and fair election was in fact rigged—ultimately leading to a violent effort to prevent its certification. Since 2020, the same formidable network of political elites, influencers, and grassroots activists, has continued to systematically erode public trust in American elections, using its power not only to frame online discourse but to target those who stand in its way.

“Misinformation” is not the challenge we face in American politics. “Misinformation” implies that a fact is wrong, or a claim has been misinterpreted. The information challenge plaguing election 2020 was something else entirely. The stories that the EIP tracked—allegations of ballots being destroyed or being “found,” dead people and undocumented immigrants voting, live people using maiden names to cast more than one vote, Sharpie markers being handed out to deliberately invalidate ballots, CIA supercomputers or Dominion machines changing votes—originated and spread via highly active, authentic, participatory online crowds that believed, with religious zeal, that an election was being stolen right before their eyes. They believed that because that is what they were being told. The frame of “The Steal” came from the top. But the “evidence” to support it came from ordinary people who worked backwards, starting from a preexisting conclusion and then looking for substantiating evidence around them. This led them to view even their own neighbors and local election officials—including Republicans—with suspicion. The rumors of election fraud were driven by a sincere conviction at the grassroots, exacerbated by the speed at which sensational stories go viral on social media today—information flies before the facts can even be established. But their real lift came from boosts by explicitly ideological and cynical right-wing influencers.

These influencers very effectively, and repeatedly, turned online rumor into perceived reality, and suspicion into conspiracy. These weren't isolated trolls or tiny fringe websites. They included Donald Trump’s sons, Charlie Kirk, and Benny Johnson, for example, and they had millions of followers in aggregate. When they succeeded in making an allegation go viral, news outlets like Fox and OANN would pick it up, and millions of viewers outside of social media would see what “some people online” were saying.

This political machine—consisting of a nexus of top politicians, MAGA grassroots, social media influencers and traditional right-wing media—highlighted random allegations of irregularities to undermine trust in an election that it was afraid it would lose and which it did lose. A president who refused to accept defeat continued to amplify conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, illegal ballots, and shadowy cabals for months (now years) after election day. His supporters believed him so completely that they were willing to resort to violence to put him back in the White House.

The Propaganda Machine Entrenches Itself

Nor did this process stop after the last election. If you saw the viral stories of pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, or malevolent FEMA workers working to steal land and lithium following Hurricane Helene, you have seen this same process in action in recent weeks. A sensational allegation appears—“They’re eating the pets!”—hyper-partisan influencers boost it—“BIG IF TRUE!”—and prominent elected officials (like JD Vance) pick it up when it serves their political aims. Threats follow, targeting whatever hapless group or individual the angry people choose to scapegoat. Immigrants. FEMA workers. Weathermen. If the allegation is found to be false, the goalposts move: OK, the politician says, the specific claim in that particular rumor might have been wrong, but the concern expressed in the story is real. This is how, for example, a video of indeterminate animals on a grill, not in Springfield, Ohio, and not involving Haitians, nonetheless made the rounds on right-wing Twitter.

This process is repetitive, but we seem unable to interrupt it. Why? Because of another long-running delegitimization campaign by this same nexus: A deliberate effort to demonize fact-checks, content labeling, and platform responses to viral lies as a “censorship-industrial complex.” Social media platforms did act in response to the election rumor mill in 2020. They leveraged their procedures to take down inauthentic foreign state-sponsored trolls, and implemented election-specific policies to address premature claims of victory, false claims of fraud, or posts that deliberately misled by telling people to vote on the wrong day. (In 2022, some sites added policies to prohibit threats to election officials that had been proliferating at an alarming rate.)

[...] But MAGA politicians and their allies spun these facts quite differently. In 2020, most of the viral and misleading election-related claims were in support of Donald Trump; consequently, a significant portion of the platforms' enforcement actions involved right-wing speakers. For right-wing politicians and influencers, this was irrefutable proof of anti-conservative bias—not of a problem of falsehoods and lies on their side. They leveraged the narrative to fuel a growing right-wing backlash against Big Tech.

[...] Perhaps the most visible among them today is Elon Musk, CEO of X (formerly Twitter) and an influential figure with over 200 million followers. Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform two years ago gave right-wing political elites a useful ally deeply sympathetic to the notion of an anti-conservative bias in social media. During the 2022 election, Musk briefly continued to support then-Twitter’s commitment to tackling foreign interference: when the EIP worked to expose Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence operations in conjunction with Twitter’s integrity teams, Musk amplified and praised the work. However, as Musk increasingly engaged with election-denying influencers, some, like former Trump administration staffer Mike Benz, began to press their advantage, even calling on Musk to fire specific moderation team “censors” by name.

Musk obliged. In order to eliminate the “censorship regime” of Old Twitter, he also released the “Twitter Files,” a cherry-picked selection of internal communications between platform staff and outsiders in government, academia, or civil society. Largely ignored by mainstream media, the Files caused a huge sensation within right-wing and heterodox Twitter. The effort sought to provide evidence to justify the belief that Twitter and its collaborators in government and academia had conspired to suppress conservatives in 2020—and to delegitimize any kind of content moderation. In reality, the files largely showed Twitter employees doing their best to make hard decisions, regularly opting not to take action on accounts that government or other outsiders suggested they look at, and in fact actively attempting to avoid moderating prominent conservatives. (One can debate to what extent the state should speak to private platforms, but the small number of flagged posts that were taken down suggests that the platforms weren’t fearing reprisals, and X’s own lawyers stated that the materials “[did] not plausibly suggest” evidence of censorship in legal filings following their release.)

In November of 2022, the House flipped to Republican control. That shift operationalized the effort to delegitimize and silence researchers like myself who’d studied the Big Lie and engaged with Big Tech. Leading that charge was Congressman Jim Jordan, himself an election denier, who ushered in a bold new version of McCarthyism by launching investigations into platforms, people, and institutions that had pushed back against the narrative of election fraud. Subpoenas went out—including to me—demanding information and interviews in response to the spurious allegations of the Twitter Files, imposing a significant monetary and time cost. The effort wasn’t about finding the truth so much as punishing those who had spoken it. And as was the case with McCarthy, no documents that were turned over, and nothing that was said, could ever actually exonerate the accused. Researchers, civil society organizations, and election integrity groups were baselessly reframed as the real villains, accused of orchestrating a vast conspiracy to suppress speech and rig elections. In other words, the MAGA propaganda machine levitated baseless allegations of censorship it itself had made to impose real censorship. And it has succeeded.

Some institutions and researchers backed away from election work, afraid of threats and continued government attention. Stanford University exited the space; the Election Integrity Partnership is not operating in the 2024 election. Other civil society and academic institutions are still tracking election rumors, but no longer speaking directly with state or local election officials or tech platforms. Governments backed away from engaging with tech companies even about suspected foreign interference. Platforms themselves have become vague about the extent to which they will moderate or fact-check rumors and conspiracy theories. The political backlash they faced for a few high-profile mistakes—like the ill-considered temporary suppression of coverage of Hunter Biden’s Laptop—has put them back on their heels.

Networks adept at spreading rumors and conspiracy theories require a networked response—which is why this concerted targeting campaign set out to dismantle collaboration, ensuring fewer obstacles to their messaging in the 2024 election. Meanwhile, policy and product changes at X since 2022 have also significantly aided the cause. Musk himself, once an advocate for platform neutrality, has become a vocal Trump surrogate. His personal political identification is not a problem; business leaders are entitled to their beliefs and speech. However, he is simultaneously X’s largest account and the governor of its policies. He has an unparalleled ability to capture attention due to how his platform recommends content, as well as a predilection for amplifying conspiracy theories that reinforce his political beliefs. He recently re-aired debunked claims about voting machines that cost Fox News a $700 million settlement.

The MAGA propaganda machine has weaponized phony claims about “censorship” to intimidate those who call out their obvious lies.

[theculturedmarxist]

In Costa Rica and Latvia today, the Atlantic Council is hosting its 360/OS Summit at RightsCon Costa Rica and NATO’s Riga StratCom. Among other things, the influential think tank will be previewing its “Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web” report, which they hope will “lay the groundwork for stronger cross-sectoral ideation and action” and “facilitate collaboration now between the expanding community dedicated to understanding and protecting trust and safety.”

In human terms, conference attendees are discussing how best to stay on-brand by presenting the Censorship-Industrial Complex as a human rights initiative, and as #TwitterFiles documents show, they have the juice to pull it off.

EngageMedia (which I co-founded and was the long-time Executive Director) co-organized RightsCon in Manila in 2015, and I personally oversaw a lot of the preparations. That looks like a big mistake. I now believe RightsCon represents everything that has gone wrong in the digital rights field. Specifically, it represents the capture of a once-vibrant movement by corporate and government interests, and a broader shift towards anti-liberal and authoritarian solutions to online challenges. I left EngageMedia on good terms, but now have no formal relationship.

In honor of this week’s RightsCon and 360/OS Summit, we dug into the #TwitterFiles to revisit the integration of the Atlantic Council’s anti-disinformation arm, the Digital Forensic Research Labs (DFRLab), while also highlighting its relationship with weapons manufacturers, Big Oil, Big Tech, and others who fund the NATO-aligned think tank.

The Atlantic Council is unique among “non-governmental” organizations thanks to its lavish support from governments and the energy, finance, and weapons sectors. It’s been a key player in the development of the “anti-disinformation” sector from the beginning. It wasn’t an accident when its DFRLab was chosen in 2018 to help Facebook “monitor for misinformation and foreign interference,” after the platform came under intense congressional scrutiny as a supposed unwitting participant in a Russian influence campaign. Press uniformly described DFRLab as an independent actor that would merely “improve security,” and it was left to media watchdog FAIR to point out that the Council was and is “dead center in what former President Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes called ‘the blob.’”

What’s “the blob”? FAIR described it as “Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy consensus,” but thanks to the Twitter Files, we can give a more comprehensive portrait. In the runup to the 360/OS event in that same year, 2018, Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council boasted to Twitter executives that the attendees would include the crème de la crème of international influence, people he explained resided at the “no-kidding decision-maker level”:

Similar correspondence to and from DFRLab and Twitter outlined early efforts to bring together as partners groups that traditionally served as watchdogs of one another. Perhaps more even than the World Economic Forum meetings at Davos or gatherings of the Aspen Institute in the US, the Atlantic Council 360/OS confabs are as expansive a portrait of the Censorship-Industrial Complex as we’ve found collected in one place.

In October 2018, DFRLab was instrumental in helping Facebook identify accounts for what became known as “the purge,” a first set of deletions of sites accused of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook in its announcement of these removals said it was taking steps against accounts created to “stir up political debate,” and the October 2018 “purge” indeed included the likes of Punk Rock Libertarians, Cop Block, and Right Wing News, among others. Even the progressive Reverb Press, founded by a relatively mainstream progressive named James Reader, found his site zapped after years of pouring thousands of dollars a month into Facebook marketing tools. “That’s what sticks in my craw. We tried to do everything they suggested,” Reader said then. “But now, everything I worked for all those years is dead.”

In the years since, DFRLab has become the central coordination node in the Censorship Industrial Complex as well as a key protagonist in the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project. Its high-profile role at RightsCon, the biggest civil society digital rights event on the calendar, should concern human rights and free expression activists. 

According to their London 2019 event “360/OS brings together journalists, activists, innovators, and leaders from around the world as part of our grassroots digital solidarity movement fighting for objective truth as a foundation of democracy.” Their Digital Sherlocks program aims to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation.” But DRFLabs are more Inspector Gadget (or double agents) than Sherlock Holmes. The Twitter Files reveal DFRLab labeled as “disinformation” content that often turned out to be correct, that they participated in disinformation campaigns and the suppression of “true” information, and that they lead the coordination of a host of actors who do the same.

Twitter Files #17 showed how DFRLab sent Twitter more than 40,000 names of alleged BJP (India’s ruling nationalist party) accounts that they suggested be taken down. DFRLab said it suspected these were “paid employees or possibly volunteers.” However as Racket’s Matt Taibbi noted, “the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics.” Twitter recognized there was little illegitimate about them, resulting in DFRLab pulling the project and cutting ties with the researcher.

Twitter Files #19 further revealed DFRLab was a core partner in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which “came together in June of 2020 at the encouragement of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA” in order to “fill the gaps legally” that government couldn’t. As a result, there are serious questions as to whether the EIP violated the US First Amendment.

DFRLab was also a core partner on the Virality Project, which pushed its seven Big Tech partners to censor “stories of true vaccine side-effects.” The Stanford Internet Observatory, which led the project, is now being sued by the New Civil Liberties Alliance for its censorship of “online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.” Debate as to the frequency of serious adverse events is ongoing, however. The German health minister put it at 1 in 10,000, while others claim it is higher. 

The Virality Project sought to suppress any public safety signals at all. The Stanford Internet Observatory is also at the moment reportedly resisting a House Judiciary Committee subpoena into its activities.

TwitterFiles #20 revealed some of the Digital Forensic Lab’s 2018 360/0S events, which brought together military leaders, human rights organizations, the Huffington Post, Facebook and Twitter, Edelman (the world’s biggest PR firm), the head of the Munich Security Conference, the head of the World Economic Forum (Borge Brende) a former President, Prime Minister and CIA head, intel front BellingCat and future Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, all to combat “disinformation.” We can now reveal more.

Introducing the Atlantic Council

The Atlantic Council is a NATO-aligned think tank established in 1961. Its board of directors and advisory board are a Who’s Who of corporate, intelligence and military power, including: 

James Clapper – former Director of National Intelligence whose tenure included overseeing the NSA during the time of the Snowden leaks. Asked whether intelligence officials collect data on Americans Clapper responded “No, sir,” and, “Not wittingly.” Clapper also coordinated intelligence community activity through the early stages of Russiagate, and his office authored a key January 2017 report concluding that Russians interfered in 2016 to help Donald Trump. Clapper has been a 360/OS attendee.

Stephen Hadley, United States National Security Advisor from 2005 to 2009 (also a 360/OS attendee)

Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State who oversaw the carpet bombing of Vietnam, among other crimes against humanity

Pfizer CEO Anthony Bourla

Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder, The Blackstone Group

Meta’s President for Global Affairs, Nick Clegg

Richard Edelman, CEO of the world’s largest PR firm (and 360/OS attendee) 

The Rt. Hon. Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Former Secretary General of NATO

Ambassador Robert B. Zoellick, Former President of the World Bank

Leon Panetta, former US Secretary of Defense & CIA Director. Panetta oversaw the US’s massive growth in drone strikes.

John F. W. Rogers. Goldman Sachs Secretary of the Board

Chuck Hagel, chairman of the Council, sits on the board of Chevron and is also a former US Secretary of Defence.

The Atlantic Council raised $70 million in 2022, $25 million of which came from corporate interests. Among the biggest donors were: the US Departments of Defense State, Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Google, Crescent Petroleum, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, Meta, Blackstone, Apple, BP, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Raytheon, ExxonMobil, Shell, Twitter, and many more. Ukraine’s scandal-ridden energy company, Burisma, whose links to Hunter Biden were suppressed by the August 2020 table-top exercise coordinated by the Aspen Institute, also made a contribution. You can view the full 2022 “honor roll” by clicking here.

The Atlantic Council is the Establishment, though many suffer from the delusion that in putting on a “Digital Sherlock” cape, they’re somehow with the rebel alliance. The opposite is true. The Atlantic Council and DFRLab don’t hide their militarist affiliations. This week’s OS/360 event at RightsCon Costa Rica runs together with a 360/OS at NATO’s Riga StratCom Dialogue, which DFRLab note they have “worked closely with” “since 2016.” 

The Birth of the Digital Forensic Research Lab

DFRLab was founded in 2016, and has been a major catalyst in expanding the “anti-disinformation” industry. Among non-governmental entities, perhaps only the Aspen Institute comes close to matching the scope, scale and funding power of DFRLab. DFRLab claims to chart “the evolution of disinformation and other online and technological harms, especially as they relate to the DFRLab’s leadership role in establishing shared definitions, frameworks, and mitigation practices.”

Almost $7 million of the Atlantic Council’s $61 million spent last year went to the DRFLabs, according to their 2022 annual financial report. Through its fellowship program, it has incubated leading figures in the “disinformation” field. Richard Stengel, the first director of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), was a fellow. GEC is an interagency group “within” the State Department (also a funder of the Atlantic Council), whose initial partners included the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others. GEC is now a major funder of DFRLab and a frequent partner:

In this video, Stengel says, “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t think it’s that awful.”

Stengel was true to his word, and apart from DFRLab, the GEC funded the Global Disinformation Index, which set out to demonetize conservative media outlets it claimed were “disinformation.” (See 37. in the censorship list) He thought the now-disgraced Hamilton68 was “fantastic.” In total, GEC funded 39 organizations in 2017. Despite Freedom of Information requests, only 3 have been made public to date. Roughly $78 million of GEC’s initial $100 million budget outlay for fiscal year 2017 came from the Pentagon, though the budgetary burden has shifted more toward the State Department in the years since.

The Global Engagement Center was established in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, via a combination of an executive order and a bipartisan congressional appropriation, led by Ohio Republican Rob Portman and Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy. The GEC was and remains virtually unknown, but reporting in the Twitter Files and by outlets like the Washington Examiner have revealed it to be a significant financial and logistical supporter of “anti-disinformation” causes.

Though tasked by Obama with countering “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests,” its money has repeatedly worked its way back in the direction of policing domestic content, with Gabe Kaminsky’s Examiner reports on the GDI providing the most graphic example. 

GEC frequently sent lists of “disinformation agents to Twitter.” Yoel Roth, former head of Trust and Safety referred to one list as a “total crock.” Roth is now a member of DFRLab’s Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web. Let’s hope he brings more trust than Stengel. You can read more on GEC’s funding here.

Other DFRLab luminaries include Simon Clark, Chairman of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (a UK “anti-disinformation” outfit that aggressively deplatforms dissidents), Ben Nimmo (previously a NATO press officer, then of Graphika (EIP and the Virality Project partners) and now Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence Lead), and Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat. Bellingcat has an ominous reputation, which it’s earned in numerous ways, including its funding by the National Endowment for Democracy (see Glenn Greenwald’s recent report and Aaron Maté’s here). Most recently, Bellingcat assisted in the arrest of the 21-year-old Pentagon leaker, further speeding up the abandonment of the Pentagon Papers Principal where the media protected, rather than persecuted, leakers. Bellingcat was part of 360/OS backroom meetings with former intel chiefs, the head of Davos and the Munich security conference among many others, as we will see soon.

As noted in the introduction, DFRLab itself has made several wrong calls on “disinformation.” In one report they highlighted “outright false narratives,” which focused mainly on the notion that Covid was an engineered bioweapon, but lumped in the “unverified” claim Covid was the “result of a lab accident.” A lab accident is now the preferred hypothesis of the US Department of Energy, the FBI, and many others. To the DFRLab it was “disinformation” and a “conspiracy theory.”

The Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project 

DFRLab were core partners on two of the most influential “anti-disinformation” initiatives of recent times.

The Virality Project built on the EIP and had partnerships with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Google, TikTok and more to combat vaccine “misinformation.” Stanford and DFRLab partnered with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Center for Social Media and Politics, and the National Congress on Citizenship. Through a shared Jira ticketing system they connected these Big Tech platforms together, with Graphika using sophisticated AI to surveil the online conversation at scale in order to catch “misinformation” troublemakers.

VP went far beyond any kind of misinformation remit, most infamously recommending to their Big Tech partners that they consider “true stories of vaccine side effects” as “standard misinformation on your platform.”

A Virality Project partner called the Algorithmic Transparency Initiative (a project of the National Congress on Citizenship) went further. Their Junkipedia initiative sought to address “problematic content” via the “automated collection of data” from “closed messaging apps,” and by building a Stasi-like “civic listening corps,” which in recent years has taken on a truly sinister-sounding mission. The current incarnation might as well be called “SnitchCorps,” as “volunteers have an opportunity to join a guided monitoring shift to actively participate in monitoring topics that disrupt communities”:

Garret Graff, who oversaw the Aspen Hunter Biden table-top exercise, was chairman of that same National Congress on Citizenship when they collaborated on the Virality Project. Both EIP and VP were led by Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a former CIA fellow who engineered the now disgraced New Knowledge initiative, which developed fake Russian bots to discredit a 2016 Alabama senate race candidate, as acknowledged by the Washington Post. You can read Racket’s previous work on the Virality Project here.

DFRLab are the elite of the “anti-disinformation” elite. They work closely with a wide range of actors who have participated in actual disinformation initiatives. Here they’re invited to an elite Twitter group set up by Nick Pickles of “anti-disinformation” luminaries First Draft, also participants in the Hunter Biden laptop tabletop, and the Alliance for Security Democracy, part of the RussiaGate Hamilton68 disinformation operation.

360/OS 

The 360/OS event marries this tarnished record with the financial, political, military, NGO, academic and intelligence elite. Some of this is visible through publicly available materials. Twitter Files however reveal the behind the scenes, including closed door, off-the-record meetings. 

“I’ve just arrived in Kyiv” Brookie notes in 2017, as he seeks to line up a meeting with Public Policy Director Nick Pickles as they discuss Twitter providing a USD $150K contribution to OS/360 (seemingly secured), and to garner high level Twitter participation. 

Pickles is visiting DC and Brookie suggests he also meet with the GEC and former FBI agent Clint Watts of Hamilton 68 renown. “Happy to make those connections,” he chimes.

360/OS events are elite and expensive — $1 million according to Brookie — so closer collaboration with Twitter, especially in the form of funding, is a high priority.

Twitter offers $150,000:

When Brookie mentions the attendees at the “no-kidding decision maker level” he isn’t kidding. Parallel to the 360/OS public program is the much more important off-the-record meeting of “decision makers ranging from the C-Suite to the Situation Room.” Here, he is explicit about a convening of military and financial power. Vanguard 25 is presented as a way to “create a discreet and honest way to close the information gap on challenges like disinformation between key decision makers from government, tech, and media.”

The document boasts of its high-level participants:

More are revealed in email exchanges, including Madeleine Albright and the head of the WEF:

They go on to list a bizarre mishmash of media leaders, intelligence officials, and current or former heads of state:

It appears Germany’s Angela Merkel was out of reach in the end, but many of the others attended this behind the scenes meeting on “disinformation.” Who are they?

Matthias Dopfner – CEO and 22% owner of German media empire Axel Springer SE, the biggest media publishing firm in Europe 

Borge Brende – head of the World Economic Forum and former Norwegian foreign minister

Toomas Hendrick Ilves – former President of Estonia who co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Blockchain Technology. Hendrick is also a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (where the Stanford Internet Observatory is housed) and is on the advisory council of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, of Hamilton 68 renown.

Chris Sacca – billionaire venture capitalist

Mounir Mahjoubi – previously Digital Manager for President Macron’s presidential campaign, and former Chairman of the French Digital Council

Reid Hoffman – billionaire and Linkedin co-founder

Ev Williams – Former CEO of Twitter and on the Twitter board at the time

Kara Swisher – New York Times opinion writer, who founded Vox Media Recode

Wolfgang Ischinger - Head of the Munich Security Conference

Aleksander Kwasniewski – Former President of Poland. Led Poland into NATO and the EU.

Richard Edelman – CEO of the largest PR company in the world

Elliot Shrage – previously Vice-President of Public Policy at Facebook (DFRLab had election integrity projects with Facebook)

Lydia Polgreen – Huffington Post Editor in Chief

Jim Clapper – former US Director of National Intelligence

Maria Ressa – co-founder of Rappler and soon to be winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 

JK Rowling was also invited to give an award, though appears she didn’t make it in the end:

Why would such a group all gather specifically around the question of “disinformation”? Is disinformation truly at such a level that it requires bringing together the world’s most popular author with military and intelligence leaders, the world’s biggest PR company, journalists, billionaires, Big Tech and more? Or is this work to build the case that there is a disinformation crisis, to then justify the creation of a massive infrastructure for censorship? A glimpse of the agenda offers clues:

Here the head of the most important military and intelligence conference in the world (Munich) sits down in a closed door meeting with a former Secretary of State and the Executive Vice-Chair of the Atlantic Council.

Which is followed by a closed door session with the Editor-in Chief of the now-defunct Huffington Post and peace-maker Maria Ressa who presented to the same group of military, intelligence, corporate and other elites. Is the role of a journalist and Nobel laureate to work behind closed doors with militarists and billionaires, or to hold them to account?

At 2022’s OS/360 at RightsCon Ressa conducted a softball interview on disinformation with current US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. In testimony last April 2023, former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell stated that Blinken “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement” by more than 50 former intelligence officials that the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russia information operation.” 

The Twitter Files also revealed that in August 2020 the Aspen Institute organized a table-top exercise to practice how best to respond to a “hack and leak” of a Hunter Biden laptop. The laptop only came to light however two months later. In attendance was First Draft (now the Information Futures Lab), the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, CNN, Yahoo! News, Facebook, Twitter and more. Here, DFRLab head Graham Brookie speaks with the Aspen Institute’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise.

After it turned out the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and the disinformation operation was more appropriately described as having been led by the likes of Blinken and the Aspen Institute. The appropriate response is apparently for RightsCon, DFRLab, Blinken and Ressa to put on a nice forum to promote these figures as “anti-disinformation” leaders.

Former DFRLab fellow and intel front Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins is also invited to the closed door sessions with a former head of the CIA, a former Prime Minister and a President. How do you keep power accountable when you are in the same cozy club? This theme runs throughout. Bellingcat is featured heavily at the public sessions also:

Higgins has a unique way of expressing himself online, given the DFRLab emphasis on striking out against divisiveness:

Would this pass RightsCon’s code of conduct? If not, he appears to be good enough for DFRLab to promote.

On the public side, we see Amnesty International participating to further collapse the distinction between those who are meant to hold power to account, and the powerful themselves. The Iraq war gave us embedded journalists, and the “anti-disinformation” field gives us embedded digital rights activists. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s Chris Krebs also joined the closed door session. Krebs was Co-Chair of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Other members included Prince Harry, the Virality Project’s Alex Stamos (Stanford Internet Observatory) and Kate Starbird (University of Washington and previous 360/OS participant), Katie Couric, and more. Craig Newmark attended as an observer.

Meanwhile Renee DiResta, former CIA fellow and Stanford Internet Observatory Research Director, presented with the former Prime Minister of Sweden. This was years before she would launch the Virality Project, and take on the bugbear of “true stories of vaccine side effects.”

The President of the Atlantic Council participated in an “off-the-record, “ behind closed doors conversation on “trust” with the CEO of the world’s biggest PR firm, Edelman.

“Public relations” and “trust” may well be opposites, and trust is being destroyed not by the disinformation street crime that these groups claim to target, but by the disinformation corporate crime protected by, or in some cases created by these same people. Disinformation is real, but its biggest purveyors are governments and powerful corporate interests.

DFRLab and RightsCon show just how far the capture of civil society by elite interests has come. Again, I made a mistake helping to co-organize RightsCon in 2015. The jumping in bed with the government and Big Tech was arguably there in 2015, though to a much lesser degree. It now partners with militarists in the form of the Atlantic Council and is an enabler of the “disinformation” grift that is so deeply impacting freedom of speech and expression.

The air-gaps that should separate civil society, media, military, billionaires, intelligence and government have collapsed, and many of these actors have formed a new alliance to advance their shared interests. If weapons manufacturers funding human rights is considered legitimate then where is the red line? Effectively, there is none.

This collapse however has also been pushed by funders, who have been proactive in asking NGOs to collaborate more with Big Tech and government - something I successfully resisted for my almost 18 years at EngageMedia, critically RightsCon was the only time I let my guard down.

The RightsCon sponsor matrix wouldn’t be out of place at NASCAR:

This is the equivalent of hosting a Climate Change conference sponsored by Shell, BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. How do you keep power accountable when Big Tech pays your wage? The “let’s all work together” approach has failed. The weakest partner, civil society, got captured and we lost. Many more lost their way and have acquiesced to and often enabled much of the new censorship regime.

A renewed and much more independent digital rights movement, with a strong commitment to freedom of expression, is well overdue.

Note: A previous version of this article mistook Blackstone for Blackwater. This has been corrected.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]