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Originally Posted by monty
The recent twitter file reporting roots towards some of this.
racket.news: Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists
Americans have been paying taxes to disenfranchise themselves, as government agencies and subcontractors undertake a massive digital blacklisting project
Matt Taibbi
Mar 2
In 2015-2016, during the brief, forgotten period when Islamic terrorism was fading as a national obsession and Trumpian “domestic extremism” had not yet become one, Barack Obama made a series of decisions that may yet prove devastating to his legacy.
The short version is he signed Executive Order 13271, establishing a “Global Engagement Center” (“GEC”) to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.” This act got almost no press and even within government, almost no one noticed.
In the bigger picture, however, a lame duck president kick-started the process of shifting the national security establishment’s focus from counterterrorism to “disinformation.” Whether by malfunction or design, this abrupt course change of Washington’s contracting supertanker would have dramatic consequences. In fact, the tale of how America’s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against “threats” in our own population, might someday be remembered as the story of our time, with collective panic over “disinfo” defining this generation in much the same way the Red Scare defined the culture of the fifties...
This is probably what’s going on in the DFRLab list: one assumes many BJP supporters have views that “rhyme” with what one might call the American version of nationalism, #MAGA. Similarly, a GEC report sent to Twitter about “Russian Pillars of Disinformation” stressed that even actors who “generate their own momentum” online should be considered part of a propaganda “ecosystem.” Independence, the GEC report stressed, should not “confuse those trying to discern the truth.”
Twitter’s complaints against agencies like GEC and projects like the India list dovetail with what current and former intelligence sources have been calling in to comment on, since the first Twitter Files reports: that though sophisticated methods for detecting true bad actors exist, virtually none of the high-profile “experts” employ those.
Instead, methodologies are often openly absurd. List #1 might target everyone who follows more than one Chinese diplomat on Twitter. List #2 might rope in everyone who’s retweeted a “Peter Douche” video or a “Free Palestine” meme made in Iran. One former GEC staffer laughs about how experts win over the media with impressive-looking “hairball” charts that nearly always come down to some sort of volume or affinity analysis: who retweets whom, whose ideas “rhyme” with whose, etc.
In a key email, Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth is asked in an internal Q&A if outside researchers can really detect “Russian fingerprints” just by looking at Twitter’s public data.
“In short, no,” he said, adding that it was really only possible to make “inferences.”
But inferences are enough, for the innumerable “Centers for Countering Whatever” whose real goals may involve deplatforming or disenfranchising domestic groups deemed unworthy of sharing the full benefits of Western civil society (like the unmolested use of PayPal, GoFundMe, Twitter, etc.). With an inference, you can smear, and with a smear, you can do damage.
The Hamilton 68 scam in this sense was perfect. It used digital alchemy to create streams of news stories tying ordinary Americans to “foreign” disinformation. With headlines like CNN’s “Russian bots are using #WalkAway to try to wound Dems in midterms” in hand, a “Disinfo Lab” or a noble journalistic enterprise like the “extremism” desk at USA Today can finish the important work of calling up strings of Internet companies to “ask” why this or that person is still allowed to use credit cards, advertise on Amazon, etc.
What organizations like GEC and subcontractors like DFRLab do are just subtler versions of those same schemes. They make lists and let the increasingly sophisticated machinery of digital deprivation do the rest. It’s bad enough when this dubious activity is private. But paying taxes for the pleasure?
state.gov/about-us-global-engagement-center-2/
racket.news: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media FraudEstablishment of the Global Engagement Center: GEC’s founding traces back to 2011 and Executive Order 13584, which established within the Department of State the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) for the purpose of “supporting agencies in Government-wide public communications activities targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.” Executive Order 13721 in 2016 transformed the CSCC into the Global Engagement Center but left its counterterrorism mission largely unchanged.
GEC’s mission expanded upon enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 to include the authority to address other foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation activities. The John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further refined this mission, and endowed it with a mandate, as reflected in GEC’s mission statement.
Matt Taibbi
Jan 27
If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s “research.” Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.
Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation.” It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC “disinformation expert”) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol...
This was not faulty science. It was a scam. Instead of tracking how “Russia” influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming. As Roth put it, “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
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