Back in 2016 we noted how U.S. power utilities like Florida Power & Light created entirely fake consumer groups to try and derail legislation that would have brought more competition to market. Six years later and the company has again found itself in the middle of another scandal, this time for buying favorable news coverage from local news outlets across the Southern U.S.
A new investigation by NPR and Floodlight News found that Florida Power & Light and Alabama Power used a company named Matrix LLC to pay numerous Florida and Alabama local news outlets in exchange for favorable local coverage.
It worked: over seven years and for less than a million bucks, local outlets often took advice on stories, softened coverage on demand, targeted political opponents, or ran press releases disguised as news stories on behalf of industry. And it worked because U.S. local news has been so eviscerated there’s not a whole lot of ethical guardrails or competent local reporters left in many (especially marginalized) communities:
“The reduction in just the size of the press corps covering state government has created a vacuum that I think tends to be filled by people who have agendas beyond serving the public interest,” says former Miami Herald executive editor Tom Fiedler.
Most of the reporters and editors either deny these relationships existed (despite email and other evidence presented by NPR), or try to flimsily justify the dodgy behavior by claiming to be a “free market based” news outlet:
“The Capitolist stands by the accuracy of every story it has published and openly acknowledges that we bring a center-right, pro-free market editorial viewpoint to our work,” Burgess writes in response to questions from NPR and Floodlight.
A similar recent report by NPR showed how political operatives have also taken advantage of the death of local news reporting to flood Americans with political propaganda.
Nobody’s doing much about any of this because nobody wants to do anything about any of this. There’s very little actual money to be made in local news and quality reporting (aside from hedge funds buying the stumbling corpses of local papers then stripping them for parts).
So instead of doing things like shoring up media regulatory oversight, trying to find creative new funding sources, or developing firewalled public funding options for local reporting, in many instances we’ve just ceded the entire local news industry to charlatans.
Charlatans that are producing something that resembles local news, but is really just propaganda for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. And despite the fact that researchers have shown this erosion has left us less informed and more divided than ever — and in many instances sways close elections against the public interest — very little has been done to change the trajectory we’re on.
In fact, despite the fact that the United States is swimming in propaganda pretending to be news, there’s very little effort to even include this fact as essential context when reporting on why U.S. voters often act as if they have a head full of pudding and routinely cheer against their best self interests.
We finally have an interesting edition of the Twitter files!
When the Twitter Files began, I actually expected something interesting to come out of them. All of the big tech companies have been unfortunately unwilling to be as transparent as they could be about how their content moderation practices work. Much of the transparency we’ve received has been either through whistleblowers leaking information (which is often misinterpreted by journalists) or through the companies partnering with academics, which often leads to rather dry analysis of what’s happening, and which maybe a dozen people read. There have been moments of openness, but the messy stuff gets hidden.
So I had hoped that when Elon took over and announced his plans to be transparent about what had happened in the past, we might actually learn some dirt. Because there’s always some dirt. The big question was what form that dirt might take, and how much of it was systemic rather than one-time errors and mistakes. But, until now, the Twitter Files have been worse than useless. They were presented by journalists who had neither the knowledge nor the experience to understand what they were looking at, combined with an apparent desire to present the narrative in a certain framing.
Because of that, I’ve written multiple posts walking through the “evidence” presented, and showing how Musk’s chosen reporters didn’t understand things and were misrepresenting reality. Given that most journalist know to put the important revelations up top, and that each new “release” in the Twitter files seemed more breathless, but less interesting, than the previous ones, I was basically expecting nothing at all of interest to come from the files. Indeed, that was a disappointment.
As Stanford’s Renee DiResta noted, this was a real missed opportunity. If the files had actually been handed over to people who understand this field, what was important, and what was banal everyday trust & safety work, the real stories could have been discussed.
The Twitter Files thus far are a missed opportunity. To settle scores with Twitter’s previous leaders, the platform’s new owner is pointing to niche examples of arguable excesses and missteps, possibly creating far more distrust in the process. And yet there is a real need for public understanding of how platform moderation works, and visibility into how enforcement matches up against policy. We can move toward genuine transparency—and, hopefully, toward a future in which people can see the same facts in similar ways.
So when the Intercept’s Lee Fang kicked off the 8th installment of the Twitter files, I was not expecting much at all. After all, Fang was one of the authors of the very recent garbage Intercept story that totally misunderstood the role of CISA in the government and (falsely) argued that the government demanded Twitter censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. The fact that the evidence from the Twitter files totally disproved his earlier story should at least result in Fang questioning his understanding of these things.
And yet… it appears that he may have (finally) legitimately found a real story of malfeasance in the Twitter files in his most recent installment. Like all the others, he initially posted his findings — where he admits he was granted access to Twitter’s internal systems via a Twitter-employed lawyer who would search for and access the documents he requested — on Twitter in a messy and hard to follow thread. He then posted a more complete story on The Intercept.
The story is still somewhat messy and confused, and it’s not entirely clear Fang even fully realizes what he found, but it does suggest serious malfeasance on the part of the government. It actually combines a few other stories we’ve covered recently. First, towards the end of the summer, Twitter and Meta announced that they had found and taken down a disinformation campaign running on their platforms — and all signs suggested the campaign was being run by the US government.
As was noted at the time, the propaganda campaign did not appear to be all that successful. Indeed, it was kind of pathetic. From the details, it sounded like someone in the US government had the dumb idea of “hey, let’s just create our own propaganda social media accounts to counter foreign propaganda accounts,” rather than embracing “hey, we’re the US government, we can just speak openly and transparently.” The overall failure of the campaign was… not surprising. And we were happy that Twitter and Meta killed the campaign (and now we’re hearing that the US government is doing an investigation into how this campaign came to be in the first place).
The second recent story we had was about Meta’s “Xcheck” program, which was initially revealed in the Facebook files as a special kind of “whitelist” for high profile accounts. Meta asked the Oversight Board to review the program, and just a few weeks ago the Oversight Board finally released its analysis and suggestions (after a year of researching the program). It turns out that it’s basically just like what we said when the program was first revealed: after a few too many “false positives” on high profile accounts became embarrassing (for example, then President Obama’s Facebook account was taken down because he recommended the book “Moby Dick” and there was an automated flag on the word “dick”), someone at Facebook instituted the Xcheck program to effectively whitelist high profile individuals so that flags on their account would need to be reviewed by a human before any action was taken.
As we discussed in our podcast about Xcheck, in many ways, Facebook was choosing to favor “false negatives” for high profile accounts over “false positives.” The end result, then, is that high profile accounts are effectively allowed to get away with more, and violate the rules with a larger lag for consequences, but they’re less likely to be suspended accidentally. Tradeoffs. The entire content moderation space is full of them.
Again as we noted when that story first came out, basically every social media platform has some form of this in action. It almost becomes necessary to deal with the scale and not accidentally ban your most high profile users. But, it comes with some serious risks and issues, which are also highlighted in the Oversight Board’s policy recommendations regarding Xcheck.
Thus, it’s not at all surprising that Twitter clearly has a similar whitelist feature. This was actually somewhat revealed in an earlier Twitter File when Bari Weiss, thinking she was revealing unfair treatment of the @LibsOfTikTok account, actually revealed it was on a similar Xcheck style whitelist that clearly showed a flag on the account saying DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING an executive team.
That’s all background that finally gets us to the Lee Fang story. It reveals that the US government apparently got some of its accounts onto this whitelist after they had been dinged earlier. The accounts, at the time, were properly labeled as being run by the US government. But here’s the nefarious bit: sometime after that, the accounts changed to no longer be transparent about the US government being behind them, but because they were on this whitelist it’s likely that they were able to get away with sketchy behavior with less review by Twitter, and it likely took longer to catch that they were engaged in a state-backed propaganda campaign.
As the article notes, in 2017, someone at the US government noticed that these accounts — which, again, at the time clearly said they were run by the US government — were somehow limited by Twitter:
On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. Central Command — also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department — emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”
“We’ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags — perhaps they were flagged as bots,” wrote Kahler. “A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.” Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Now, it seems reasonable to question whether or not Twitter should have put them on a whitelist in the first place, but if they were properly marked, and not engaged in violative behavior, you can see how it happened. But Twitter absolutely should have had policies stating that if those accounts have their descriptions or names or whatever changed, the whitelist flag should automatically be removed, or at least sent up for a human review to make sure it was still appropriate. And that apparently did not happen.
As The Intercept report notes, Twitter at this time was under tremendous pressure from basically all corners about the fact that ISIS was an effective user of social media for recruitment and propaganda. So the company had been somewhat aggressive in trying to stamp that out. And it sounds like the US accounts got caught up in those efforts.
So there is a lot of interesting stuff revealed here: more details on the US government’s foreign social media propaganda campaigns, and more evidence of how Twitter’s “whitelist” program works and the fact that it did not appear to have very good controls (not that surprising, as almost no company’s similar tool has good controls, as we saw with the OSB’s analysis of Xcheck for Meta).
But… the spin that “Twitter aided the Pentagon in its covert online propaganda campaign,” is, yet again, kinda missing the important stuff here. Neither the Pentagon nor Twitter look good in this report, but in an ideal world it would lead to more openness (a la the OBS’s look into Xcheck) regarding how Twitter’s whitelist program works, as well as more revelations about how the DOD was able to run its foreign propaganda campaign, including how it changed Twitter accounts from being public about their affiliation to hiding it.
This is where it would be useful if a reporter who understood how all this worked was involved in the research and could ask questions of Twitter regarding how big the whitelist is (for Meta it reached about 6 million users), and what the process was for getting on it. What controls were there? Who could put people on the whitelist? Were there ever any attempts to review those who were on the whitelist to see if they abused their status? All of that would be interesting to know, and as Renee DiResta’s piece noted, would be the kinds of questions that actual experts would ask if Elon gave them access to these files, rather than… whoever he keeps giving them to.
For several years we’ve noted how most of the calls to ban TikTok are bad faith bullshit made by a rotating crop of characters that not only couldn’t care less about consumer privacy, but are directly responsible for the privacy oversight vacuum TikTok (and everybody else) exploits.
The Act (pdf), according to the two lawmakers, vaguely attempts to “block and prohibit all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern.” It comes on the heels of numerous state bills attempting to ban state government employees from using TikTok on their personal devices.
Rubio’s new federal bill attempts to leverage the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEA) to ban TikTok from operating domestically here in the States, despite the fact that judges have ruled several times now that the IEAA doesn’t include such authority. Violating the act would result in criminal penalties of up to a $1 million fine and 20 years in prison.
Rubio trots out the now familiar argument that we simply must ban the hugely popular social media app because the Chinese could use it to propagandize children or spy on Americans:
“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok. This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day. We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”
So there are always two underlying claims when it comes to justifying a ban on TikTok. One, that the Chinese could use the app to propagandize children, of which there’s been zero meaningful evidence of at any coordinated scale. The other, more valid but overstated concern, is that TikTok-owner ByteDance will simply funnel U.S. consumer data to the Chinese government for ambiguous surveillance purposes.
Here’s the thing though: for decades the GOP (and more than a few Democrats) have worked tirelessly to erode FTC privacy enforcement authority and funding, while fighting tooth and nail against absolutely any meaningful privacy legislation for the Internet era. That opened the door for countless app makers, data brokers, telecoms, and bad actors from all over the world (including TikTok) to repeatedly abuse this accountability and oversight free for all.
For years, all you had to do to dodge any scrutiny was claim that the data you’re collecting is “anonymized,” a gibberish term with absolutely no meaning. Most anonymized users can be easily identified with just a smattering of additional datasets, allowing companies all around the globe to build detailed profiles of nearly every aspect of consumer behavior, from shopping and browsing habits to real-world movement and behavior patterns. Not even your health or mental health data is safe, really.
Bluntly, it’s because we spent two decades prioritizing making money over consumer safety or market health. The check is long overdue, and you see the impact every time you turn around in the form of another hack, breach, or privacy scandal.
Of course, this free for all was abused by foreign governments. It was never a question that corruption and a lack of market oversight would be exploited by foreign governments. If you actually care about national security, holding all companies and data brokers accountable for privacy abuses should be your priority. A basic, helpful, well-written privacy law should be your priority. A working, staffed, properly funded FTC should be your priority.
The GOP (and several Democrats) aren’t doing that because U.S. companies might lose some money. Instead, they’re pretending that banning a single app somehow fixes the entirety of a much bigger problem. A problem they genuinely helped create by opposing pretty much any meaningful oversight for any data-hoovering operation, provided they pinky swore they weren’t doing anything dodgy with it.
As we’ve noted several times now, you could ban TikTok immediately and the Chinese government could simply buy this (and more) data from a rotating crop of dodgy data brokers and assorted middlemen. As such, banning TikTok doesn’t actually fix any of the problems here, no matter how many times FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr claims otherwise on the TV.
You can also ban TikTok if you genuinely think it helps, but if you’re not doing the other stuff, you’re not actually doing anything. Another TikTok will simply spring up in its place because you haven’t done anything about the underlying conditions that opened the door to U.S. consumer data abuse by foreign governments. In any way. You’ve just put on a dumb play.
If you’re genuinely concerned about national security and privacy, you’d take the time to actually study the bigger problem. Vaguely pretending you’re standing up to the dastardly Chinese helps agitate and excite an often xenophobic GOP base, but what you’re actually doing is comprised of little more than some hand waving and a few farts unless you take meaningful, broader action.
I tend to think the real motivation here is actually just the usual: money. The GOP wants to force ByteDance to offload TikTok to an American billionaire of its choice. If you recall, Trump’s big “solution” for the “TikTok problem” was to sell the entire app to his buddies over at Walmart and Oracle, the latter with a long track record of its own various privacy abuses.
I’d wager this entire performance about TikTok is the lobbying off-gassing of some company that either doesn’t want to compete with TikTok directly (Facebook lobbyists can often be found trying to cause DC moral panics around TikTok), or some company or companies that hope to leverage phony privacy concerns to force ByteDance to sell them one of the most popular apps in tech history.
This is context you’ll find largely omitted from most press coverage of the story. Instead, you can watch as most press outlets unquestioningly frame politicians with an abysmal track record on consumer privacy (Brendan Carr or Marsha Blackburn quickly come to mind) as good faith champions of consumer privacy, despite the documented fact they’re directly responsible for the problem they’re pretending to fix.
While traditional local papers deserve no shortage of blame for their failure to adapt, media scholars have long pointed out that media consolidation paved the way for a lot of the problems we’re seeing today. The end result of consolidation was the gradual elbowing out of small local news outfits, leaving the sector peppered with propaganda mills like Sinclair Broadcasting, or hollowed out, hedge fund run papers.
A lack of local, quality news has created a vacuum that’s increasingly been filled by political propagandists. Said propagandists have increasingly created “pink slime” news outlets that look like local news, but exist exclusively to spread bullshit and political propaganda.
And once again, they’re highly active ahead of the midterm elections. A new report by NPR documented how residents around the country have been receiving fake newspapers from fake news outlets, filling their heads with fake election misinformation:
Schoenburg first noticed these papers several election cycles ago, born out of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, which crusaded against greater taxation and regulation. Since then, they have spread across the state, presenting themselves as down-home newspapers in multiple communities with names that hark back to times before people relied on social media to find out out about developments in their communities.
NPR tried to contact story authors at the “papers,” and couldn’t find a single real person. Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University (she just wrote a full report that’s worth a read), told NPR that she had counted more than 1,200 bogus local news outlets around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading bullshit (on top of the bullshit they already consume online).
Researchers have already measured how the death of local news at the hands of consolidation has left Americans less informed and more divided than ever. Nobody has genuinely measured the impact of filling that void with political propaganda. While NPR found that about 5% of these fake news outlets were coming from Democrats, the rest were forged by a broad, right-wing coalition:
She documented instances in which the sites and the larger network provided advertising, SMS messages, robocalls and websites as well as consulting and production costs. Timpone is not the only key figure in the system. Bengani also found links to a huge Texas PAC and a major Republican donor who is an oil-and gas-billionaire. In Texas, articles blamed wind power for the failure of the electrical grid there last year. (That has been discredited by multiple mainstream news outlets.)
Republicans actively opposed financing the press, actively opposed media consolidation restrictions, and have waged a concerted, 45-year effort to build an alternative reality propaganda empire designed to trick Americans into supporting policies that routinely operate against their best interests. Not only that, they managed to get most of the remaining press to act as if this isn’t happening.
Fixing a problem like this requires a multi-tendriled approach we show no interest in adopting. We need more creative funding for journalism untethering it from industry influence and ads. We need better education standards. We need tougher media consolidation guidelines. We need campaign finance reform. We need voting reform. We need a press that can call out right wing propaganda for what it is, instead of hiding between nebulous “bothsideism.” We’re doing… none of that.
Instead, what we mostly get is a lot of hyperventilation about “disinformation,” followed by lengthy conversations about what’s not possible courtesy of the First Amendment. There the problem sits like a giant turd nobody wants to touch. The NPR piece, for example, presents the problem in great detail — then offers not a single coherent vision for how we can do absolutely anything about it.
We’ve noted repeatedly how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr doesn’t have the authority to regulate social media. And over in the sector he does actually regulate, telecom, Carr is routinely a no show. He’s been a consistent opponent of holding telecom monopolies like AT&T accountable for pretty much anything, and generally doesn’t believe government has any real role telling telecom monopolies what to do.
Those principles routinely get thrown out of the window when Carr discusses TikTok and social media. Carr’s face has been peppered across news outlets for much of the year calling for a ban of the popular social media app, and once again was rewarded with headlines via a new interview with Axios. Again, Carr calls for a complete and total ban of TikTok:
Carr highlighted concerns about U.S. data flowing back to China and the risk of a state actor using TikTok to covertly influence political processes in the United States. There simply isn’t “a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party],” Carr said.
Here’s the thing: Carr has actively opposed any and all efforts to create any meaningful privacy safeguards over the telecom, adtech, or app sectors. As a result, you could ban TikTok immediately with a giant, patriotic hammer, and the Chinese government could simply buy comparable data from a rotating array of equally dodgy adtech middlemen with zero ethical restraint and little to no oversight.
The sector Carr actually regulates, telecom, has been plagued with a parade of location data scandals showcasing how cellular carriers have repeatedly failed to protect user location data, often to devastating effect. Carr’s been largely a no show on the subject, despite its increased life and death relevance post Roe.
So again, the fixation on “banning TikTok” sounds great until you realize it’s mostly a distraction from our corruption-fueled failure on privacy legislation and consumer protection. Carr again is an absolute no show on this issue in the sector he actually regulates, and his belief (widely shared!) that banning TikTok actually fixes anything indicates he doesn’t understand how any of this works.
For literally twenty-five years we’ve ignored privacy advocates’ call for stricter consumer data safeguards and increased penalties for companies that repeatedly fail to secure data. At almost every turn we prioritized profit over security and privacy. Even when the check came due and we were bombarded with a steady parade of hacks, breaches, and various privacy scandals our solutions were largely performative.
Like most of Trumpland, Carr opposes meaningful privacy laws. Carr also opposes ensuring that privacy regulators at the FTC have the staff and resources to actually do their jobs. The entire policy approach by folks like Carr has been to generally let the biggest corporations do whatever they want, especially when it comes to the over-collection and monetization of user location, browsing, and other data.
Of course, the same broken-ass system routinely exploited by corporations was also going to be exploited by authoritarian governments. Actual privacy proponents made this point for decades.
Now, many of the same folks who helped build this greed-based, zero-accountability paradigm from the ground up want you to believe banning TikTok somehow fixes everything. But the endless hyperventilation about TikTok specifically (which is fueled in no small part by covert Facebook lobbying and in some instances just ignorant bigotry) is a distraction from our corruption-fueled failures on privacy and consumer protection more generally.
If you’re a politician professing you’re serious about consumer privacy and security, support the passage of a meaningful privacy law for the internet era, or shut up and get out of the way.
Early on in the pandemic, the World Health Organization warned that the world was facing an “infodemic,” a mass outbreak of false and misleading information. While the WHO did not coin the term, it certainly made it popular, and contributed to the idea that it was the internet that was the leading cause of this infodemic. Today, it seems set in stone that the internet is the main vector for the spread of false information, and this is leading to all sorts of regulatory pushes by people all around the globe who think that the internet is to blame for all the bad stuff that is happening.
However, as we’ve noted over the years, the data… rarely seems to back up these claims. In 2019, we wrote about the book, Network Propaganda, written by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, which presents a ton of evidence that lies about the 2016 election would go viral not because of the internet, but because of Fox News pushing them. In 2020 (pre-election), they released some follow-up research concerning disinformation about mail-in ballots and again found that the spread of misinformation was “elite-driven, mass-media led” and that social media “played only a secondary role.”
But maybe you question their methodology (though, you should read the details, because it’s pretty comprehensive and thorough). Nirit Weiss-Blatt points us to an article by journalists-turned-academics Nick Mathews and Mark Coddington, highlighting a bundle of recent research that again suggests little evidence of an online “infodemic,” but at least some evidence of Fox News being the real main venue for spreading disinformation.
We find that in 2020 online news consumption increased. Trustworthy news outlets benefited the most from the increase in web traffic. In the UK trustworthy news outlets also benefited the most from the increase in Facebook engagement, but in other countries both trustworthy and untrustworthy news outlets benefited from the increase in Facebook engagement. Overall, untrustworthy news outlets captured 2.3% of web traffic and 14.0% of Facebook engagement, while news outlets regularly publishing false content accounted for 1.4% of web traffic and 6.8% of Facebook engagement. People largely turned to trustworthy news outlets during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
Next up was a study that involved surveying 14,000 people exploring whether or not the pandemic drove people into their own echo chambers. Again, we’ve highlighted other research in the past that suggests the internet actually decreases echo chambers, rather than increases them. Here, this new research more or less confirms the same thing regarding COVID info. The research looked at whether or not people focused on “like-minded” information (echo chambers) or explored more “cross cutting” (diverse) sources of information, and it showed a strong indication of cross-cutting information — though that was even stronger where citizens were most concerned about COVID and where governments were screwing up. In other words, when the government is incompetent, people inherently know it’s not healthy to stick in information bubbles.
A widely believed claim is that citizens tend to selectively expose themselves to like-minded information. However, when individuals find the information useful, they are more likely to consume cross-cutting sources. While crises such as terror attacks and pandemics can enhance the utility of cross-cutting information, empirical evidence on the role of real-world external threats in selective exposure is scarce. This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to test the extent to which citizens were exposed to information from cross-cutting sources on traditional and social media after the outbreak. Utilizing a two-wave panel survey among 14,218 participants across 17 countries – conducted before and after the initial outbreak – we show that citizens concerned about COVID-19 were more exposed to cross-cutting information on traditional and social media. The positive relationship with cross-cutting exposure to traditional news was stronger in countries where governments adopted less stringent policy responses, and in countries with greater pandemic severity and weaker democratic institutions. Our comparative approach thus sheds light on the social and political contexts in which cross-cutting exposure can occur.
I don’t think we should look at that as a ringing endorsement of incompetent governments, but it is still an interesting all around finding.
This research assesses how the environment for coronavirus disease (COVID) information contributed to the public’s willingness to support measures intended to mitigate the spread and transmission of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic. A representative sample of 600 Floridians was surveyed in April 2020. After controlling for sociodemographic factors, COVID anxiety, and knowledge about the virus, we find that components of the information environment mattered for public opinion related to mitigation policies. Television news sources, including local and national network news, center-left cable news (i.e., CNN, MSNBC), and Fox News, contributed to shaping policy support. The results highlight the importance of televised news coverage in shaping public opinion toward healthcare-related policies.
As Coddington and Mathews note, with the controls for partisanship, this study shows that this is not just correlation between conservatives pre-disposed to one view all watching Fox News, and liberals pre-disposed to the opposite view watching MSNBC. Instead, it strongly suggests that cable news contributes to their views:
The control for partisanship is a key factor here. It indicates that the influence of Fox News is not simply a product of conservatives being more likely to oppose mitigation and also more likely to watch Fox News. It suggests, instead, that the cable channels (and network TV news) may have had an influence apart from simple partisan audience self-selection. On the flip side, neither Facebook nor government communication (e.g., press conferences by Donald Trump and other elected officials) were significantly associated with views on mitigation.
So, now the studies seem to be coming fast and furious suggesting that cable news has much more of an impact on our views than the internet. And yet, I can bet that we’re just going to keep hearing about how everything is the fault of the internet. Of course, it seems worth noting that it’s often the very same mainstream media, either cable news itself, or publications owned by the same companies who own cable news… pushing these “infodemic” stories. It’s almost as if they have a reason to attack the internet, while ignoring their own culpability.
There’s a routine assumption that U.S. partisan division is something that’s just inherent in the American DNA. In reality, the nation’s divisions are routinely and intentionally cultivated and encouraged by powerful and wealthy individuals and corporations to stall consensus and reform. Both parties are culpable, though it’s the GOP that has perfected the tactic as an art form.
Take broadband for example. A bipartisan majority of Americans hate Comcast or their local cable company and support any efforts to challenge that monopoly power. But any time anybody attempts to do absolutely anything to challenge that power you’ll notice a lot of rhetoric about how those efforts are “socialism,” “government run amok,” or “radically partisan.”
It doesn’t matter what we’re doing to hold telecom monopolies accountable. It could be encouraging net neutrality, blocking problematic mergers, holding AT&T accountable for fraud… it’s all very quickly framed through a partisan lens despite the fact it’s not at all actually partisan, and a significant bipartisan majority of Americans support the efforts to try something smarter and better.
The same dumb gamesmanship infects our national conversations about improving our failing infrastructure. Everybody wants their roads, bridges, airports, and utilities to function well, but key corporations often aren’t as keen. Comcast doesn’t want increased broadband competition. Oil giants don’t much care for solar power. The auto industry doesn’t much care for mass transit.
So again, they infect the discourse with claims that absolutely any effort to try and improve anything is somehow radically political. Corporate giants (see again AT&T and Comcast) prey on partisan disdain for taxation (despite they themselves being a massive beneficiary of wasteful taxpayer subsidization). They suggest that policies common across the world are themselves somehow partisan and radical.
And it almost always works, and has worked for the better part of fifty years. The GOP in particular has long been a useful marionette in this little game we play, and did so once again in the wake of the infrastructure bill — using partisan division to sow disdain among their base, while simultaneously taking credit for the very real improvements the bill will bring to the everyday lives of their constituents.
Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, a leading Biden critic who explained his vote against what he called a “phony” infrastructure bill by issuing a statement that “this bill only serves to advance the America Last’s socialist agenda, while completely lacking fiscal responsibility,” wrote threeseparateletters between March and July advocating for projects in his district. They’d enhance quality of life, Gosar wrote. They’d ease congestion and boost the economy. They’d alleviate bottlenecks and improve rural living conditions.
On one hand, their covert approval of the infrastructure bills still result in better outcomes for the constituents (the broadband bill alone is going to deliver more than $50 billion in improved service across the country). But the bad faith bullshit employed with the other hand creates untold damage in terms of trust in government, belief in policy, and any effort to actually get anything done.
It’s all an extension of the propaganda and culture war gibberish that has become a cornerstone of GOP power. All promoted by a AM radio/Fox News/Sinclair/YouTube propaganda apparatus it took the GOP and major corporations the better part of the last forty years to build. That, in turn, is an extension of corporate power, and its entire function is to agitate the public, sow distrust, and erode meaningful consensus and reform on the most foundational of issues that actually have widespread support.
And you see its “success” absolutely everywhere you look in policy. To the point where words like “socialism” have lost all coherent meaning. What you won’t see as much of are intelligent solutions to any of it. In large part because the dysfunction remains immensely profitable.
When last we checked in with One America News (OAN), it was trying (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) to pretend that DirecTV’s decision to boot the barely watched conspiracy network from its cable lineup was part of a vast, diabolical cabal to censor conservatives (it wasn’t). It then decided to attack Verizon, right before that cable provider kicked it to the curb as well.
That has left the conspiracy theory peddling network to try and survive amidst a crowded market of right-wing propaganda mills that flood the zone with endless gibberish and victimization porn. But OAN is also apparently hoping to leverage old TV antennas and over the air broadcasts to keep its reach alive:
OAN is signing up partners to broadcast on so-called “subchannels.” OAN airs on free, over-the-air channels in about 30 markets and plans to be in about 100 by the end of this year, according to a person familiar with the company’s strategy who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. The markets include Pittsburgh; Las Vegas; Wichita, Kansas; Jacksonville, Florida; and Birmingham, Alabama.
A government mandated shift to digital broadcasting freed up airwaves for TV station owners to create multiple additional new channels. These “subchannels” are predominantly filled with reruns of old sitcoms and gameshows. Now, viewers will get to enjoy unhinged election conspiracies, race-baiting disinformation, and programming that undermines public health messaging.
While not insubstantial, the channel’s range will remain constrained. Only about 15% of US households still use over the air antennas, and while that’s up from 10% in 2010, it’s still a tiny fraction of the already small reach the far right wing propaganda outlet saw on traditional cable.
Despite making a lot of headlines for its batshit claims (like the idea COVID was crafted in a North Carolina lab), the news channel never really saw all that many actual viewers. One estimate pegged daily viewership at around 14,000 a few years ago, and that was before the channel got kicked off of DirecTV and Verizon, its biggest distributors.
The moral high ground is almost impossible to hold. The United States has portrayed itself as the world ideal for personal freedom and government accountability, despite those holding power working tirelessly to undermine both of those ideals.
It’s not that other world governments aren’t as bad or worse. It’s that “whataboutism” isn’t an excuse for navigating the same proverbial gutters in pursuit of end goals or preferred narratives. The ends don’t justify the means. The fact that other countries violate rights more often (or more extremely) doesn’t excuse our own.
Hypocrisy and government entities are never separated by much distance. Our government has fought a War on Drugs for years, publicly proclaiming the menace created by the voluntary exchange of money for goods while privately leveraging drug sales to supply weapons to the US’s preferred revolutionaries or simply to ensure local law enforcement agencies have access to funding options that operate outside of oversight restraints.
Under President Biden, the administration (briefly) formed a “Disinformation Governance Board” under the oversight of the DHS. The intent was to prevent foreign disruption of elections and other issues of public concern. The intent may have been pure, but the reality was Orwellian. Fortunately, it was quickly abandoned.
But while the federal government sought ways to respond to the disinformation spread by foreign, often state-sponsored, entities, it was apparently doing the same thing itself, as Lucas Ropek reports for Gizmodo.
In July and August, Twitter and Meta announced that they had uncovered two overlapping sets of fraudulent accounts that were spreading inauthentic content on their platforms. The companies took the networks down but later shared portions of the data with academic researchers. On Wednesday, the Stanford Internet Observatory and social media analytics firm Graphika published a joint study on the data, revealing that the campaigns had all the markings of a U.S. influence network.
According to the report [PDF], the US was engaged in a “pro-US influence operation” targeting platform users in Russia, China, and Iran. Specific attribution is apparently impossible at this point, but evidence points to the use of US government-created sock puppet accounts (with possible assistance of the UK government) to win hearts and minds (however illegitimately) in countries very much opposed to direct US intervention.
It was not a small operation. Although likely dwarfed by operations originating in China and Russia, the US government leveraged dozens of accounts to produce hundreds of thousands of posts reflecting the preferred narrative of the United States.
Twitter says that some 299,566 tweets were sent by 146 fake accounts between March 2012 and February 2022. Meanwhile, the Meta dataset shared with researchers included “39 Facebook profiles, 16 pages, two groups, and 26 Instagram accounts active from 2017 to July 2022,” the report says.
Being American doesn’t mean being better. As the authors of the report note, most of the effort was low effort: AI-generated profile photos, memes, and political cartoons were all in play. But, more notably, the accounts spread content from distinctly American government-related services like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.
This is not to say the United States government is wrong to combat disinformation being spread by countries often considered to be enemies. But it should do so through official outlets, not faux accounts represented by AI-generated photos and unquestioning regurgitation of US government-generated content. Splashing around in the disinformation sewer doesn’t make any participant any better. It just ensures every entity that does so will get dirty.
For much of the last decade, Vladimir Putin has attempted to compensate for various shortcomings (like a less sophisticated real world military) by launching cyber and propaganda attacks on much of the world. And while this, for a while, resulted in a mythology that Russia was in a league of its own when it comes to hacking and cybersecurity, the reality isn’t nearly that exciting.
Jeremiah Fowler, co-founder of the cybersecurity company Security Discovery, spent much of the last year investigating Anonymous’ attacks on Russia as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a random sampling of 100 Russian databases, he found 92 of them to have been compromised recently.
That’s in addition to widespread DDOS attacks, hack and leak attacks on numerous companies still doing business in Russia, the hacking of Russian printers to show anti-war messages, hacking retail receipt printers to transmit anti-war messages, and even the hacking of Russian streaming services to show heavily propagandized Russian citizens real-time war footage:
The hacking collective #Anonymous hacked into the Russian streaming services Wink and Ivi (like Netflix) and live TV channels Russia 24, Channel One, Moscow 24 to broadcast war footage from Ukraine [today] pic.twitter.com/hzqcXT1xRU
Fowler began his investigation rather underwhelmed at the claims being made by Anonymous and other hacking groups, noting a lack of evidence in most media reports. But when he actually began investigating the found the attacks to be widespread and Russia’s defenses fairly pathetic:
“Anonymous has made Russia’s governmental and civilian cyber defenses appear weak,” he told CNBC. “The group has demystified Russia’s cyber capabilities and successfully embarrassed Russian companies, government agencies, energy companies and others.”
“The country may have been the ‘Iron Curtain,‘” he said, “but with the scale of these attacks by a hacker army online, it appears more to be a ‘paper curtain.’”
Russia’s great innovative contributions to the twenty-first century have so far been implementing online propaganda (“flooding the zone with shit” to destabilize truth itself, as fascists like to say) at global scale, carpet bombing children at shopping malls, and completely removing even the faintest pretense of ethical considerations from nation state hacking attacks.
Online propaganda, war crimes, and reckless global hacking obviously aren’t exclusive to Russia (or the U.S., or China, or Israel), but the idea that Russia’s pioneering efforts on this front meant it was somehow technologically exceptional in any way don’t appear to actually be based on much of anything.
