All posts by Brooke Binkowski

analysis, chinese-americans, chinese-language disinformation, disinformation, gun violence, guns, half moon bay mass shooting, immigrants, monterey park mass shooting, propaganda, racism, reporting, TruthOrFiction

Mass Shootings, Violence in California Highlight Issue of Disinformation in Immigrant Communities

Two mass shootings in California in the first weeks of 2023, both committed by immigrants in their sixties, have highlighted the issue of disinformation and propaganda targeting American immigrant communities, and how the prods and pulleys of stochastic terrorism work — in any language.

The underlying tensions also underscore the need for multilingual journalism in the United States, and for journalists and debunkers to deeply understand communities with high numbers of immigrants and refugees and their internal cultural pressures in order to properly fight the corrosive effects of weaponized narratives. It also demands an understanding of how disinformation campaigns and stochastic terrorism work to strengthen one another.

Jinxia Niu is a debunker and the digital engagement program manager with Chinese for Affirmative Action, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization, which launched a Chinese-language fact-checking site called PiYaoBa (Meaning “let’s fact-check it”) in June 2022.

“After the recent two shootings happened, many folks were asking the question, why first-generation Asian-Americans?” she said. “Why these old men?”

Niu said that as with every mass shooting, discussions around the underlying causes revolved around issues such as depression, social isolation, and lack of mental health care. However, isolation and lack of access to care are only part of the picture, she said. There is also a steady, years-long drumbeat of disinformation intended to shake Americans’ faith in democratic institutions which does not begin or end with English speakers.

“As a Chinese language fact checker, what I’m seriously thinking about is, where do they get information from? And where do they get the idea for owning a gun, for a mass shooting? And how many of these potential shooters are out there that are being impacted by the same information? So these questions get me very worried,” she said.

In September 2022, PiYaoBa released a report on right-wing disinformation campaigns invading social media platforms such as WeChat, a Chinese mobile app popular in the United States and very heavily used among first-generation immigrants, where weaponized narratives proliferate:

As of August 2020, WeChat had 3.8 million monthly active users in the U.S. That means 60% of Chinese Americans are active on WeChat, a space where right-wing disinformation dominates. To share accurate information on the platform is difficult because of its closed nature and the Chinese government’s censorship.

The groups behind disinformation are well-resourced, including the two largest media giants focused on Chinese Americans: The Falun Gong-backed Epoch Times Media Group and Guo Media Group, formed in April 2020 by billionaire Guo Wengui and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

The Chinese-language disinformation narratives targeting Americans are similar to those in English; as with such campaigns in any language, they leverage racism within and directed at communities in order to foment and promulgate fear, anger, and disgust, which can then be leveraged against specific groups of people.

“Our Chinese fact-checking websites report there are at least 150 disinformation accounts, of which 54 are from WeChat, around 45 are from Twitter, and 35 from YouTube, said Niu. “At the same time, the media outlet or social media platforms providing accurate information and progressive narratives at its most is around 20. So that just gives you an idea of how just flat-out overwhelmed the Chinese language digital space is.”

A November 2020 ProPublica-KQED article described how Chinese Americans were being targeted ahead of elections:

At least two dozen groups on the Chinese-owned social media app WeChat have been circulating misinformation that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is “preparing to mobilize” the National Guard and “dispatch” the military to quell impending riots, apparently in an attempt to frighten Chinese Americans into staying home on Election Day.

The misinformation, which takes the form of a photo of a flyer and is in both English and Chinese, also warns that the government plans to impose a national two-week quarantine and close all businesses. “They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to prevent looters and rioters,” it states. The flyer originally appeared on WeChat during the first surge of the pandemic, and it later spread to other social media. It recently resurfaced on WeChat.

Despite years of warnings, an October 2022 story in the New York Times underscored how little has been done by social media platforms to push back against disinformation and misinformation (in any language), and how thinly resourced debunking and fact-checking teams have become amid wave after wave of media layoffs:

Misinformation swirling in Chinese on Twitter, YouTube and WeChat about mail-in ballots, school curriculums and hate crimes “has dangerous implications” this year for Asian American voters, who are growing as a political force, according to the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC.

“There’s definitely a hyper-targeting of messaging,” said Nick Nguyen, a co-founder of Viet Fact Check, a group that offers explanations about misinformation circulating among Vietnamese Americans. “This is where a lack of English-language fluency can make populations vulnerable.”

Viet Fact Check is among a growing number of groups trying to contextualize and debunk false online narratives in languages other than English. Factchequeado, a six-month-old Spanish-language service, is examining inaccurate translations, manipulated images and misleadingly edited videos about the search of Mar-a-Lago and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Desifacts, which focuses on South Asian American communities, began publishing explainers and clarifications about topics such as immigration and student debt relief in Hindi, Bengali and Tamil in February.

The disinformation easily travels from network to network, as it is designed to do. January 2022 open letter from Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network to YouTube pointed out the international quality of disinformation campaigns, excoriating the platform for doing so little to prevent them or stop their spread on that platform:

In the last year, we have seen conspiracy groups thriving and collaborating across borders, including an international movement that started in Germany, jumped to Spain and spread through Latin America, all on YouTube. Meanwhile, millions of other users were watching videos in Greek and Arabic that encouraged them to boycott vaccinations or treat their COVID-19 infections with bogus cures. Beyond COVID-19, YouTube videos have been promoting false cures for cancer for years.

The way disinformation is leveraged to spark stochastic terrorism is well documented:

At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.

[…]

Propagandists have fomented disgust to dehumanize Jewish people as vermin; Black people as subhuman apes; Indigenous people as “savages”; immigrants as “animals” unworthy of protection; and members of the LGBTQ community as sexual deviants and “predators” who prey upon children.

That horrifying history is now repeating itself, as political extremists create dangerous new strains of contempt and hatred. During the COVID pandemic, there has been a surge of racism and xenophobia, as well as violence against foreigners who are baselessly blamed for importing disease and crime.

In English-language media, both social and traditional, those identified as vulnerable to motivation by the constellations of disinformation around established networks such as those around QAnon or anti-vaccine actions (for example) are bombarded with inflammatory narratives and claims and encouraged to arm themselves.

When targeting immigrant and refugee groups, the mechanisms and basic narratives are the same, but the human networks and shared cultural references used to disseminate information and therefore disinformation differ, confounding monolingual researchers and others with little to no understanding of the cultural and historical details that corrosive disinformation and propaganda campaigns seize upon in order to be effective.

This demands cultural and historical literacy when covering such groups, as well as a firm grasp of subtleties and connotations of the languages they speak.

Many of the disinformation narratives are translated directly from far right, pro-gun narratives already well embedded within English-language campaigns in the United States, such as rumormongering about the “Deep State” and claims that violent attacks are “false flags” used as pretexts by the government to confiscate citizens’ guns; however, given the opportunistic nature of disinformation and propaganda narratives, the details of their framing, when directed toward immigrant groups, can look markedly different from their English counterparts.

For example, Niu said, Chinese-language disinformation includes a uniquely heavy focus on buying weapons for self-defense against criminals — and, potentially, the government, which easily plays into English-language narratives about owning guns as a Constitutional right and Democrats being soft on crime.

“It speaks particularly well to the Chinese-American community becaues many of our community members, especially first generation Chinese-Americans, they have experienced the collective trauma of, for example, China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1970s,” said Niu.

“They know the pain of what it means that only the government has guns, has armies… So even after two mass shootings the pro-gun narratives in the Chinese language social media is still, owning a gun equals democracy. If you wanted gun control, that basically equals dictatorship or authoritarianism.”

Another carefully curated claim is that American law enforcement has no obligation to protect the individual, only the society as a whole, forcing individuals to fend for themselves — especially in states such as California that are dominated politically by the Democratic Party, which per those same disinformation purveyors is “soft on crime.”

But the end game is the same in any language – targeting the vulnerable in order to induce a climate of fear and rage, getting people to buy weapons, and stoking unrest and, ultimately, stochastic terrorism. The overwhelming fear that such attacks inflict on any community are then used to play even more into a fear-based, gun-heavy narrative, just as in English-language media.

And, while it is impossible to point to any one single cause of any mass shooting, the heavy far right narratives seem to be working by at least one metric, according to Andy Wong, Chinese for Affirmative Action’s advocacy director. “Gun ownership in the AAPI [Asian-American and Pacific Islander] community in the U.S. has actually been historicallly low,” he said. “But what we’re finding out is that many community members are becoing first time gun owners during the pandemic, and they’re inadvertently putting themselves and their loved ones at risk.”

Study after study shows that a heavy increase in gun ownership is accompanied by an increase in gun violence.

Wong said that that it is important for immigrant communities to resist what he called the “siren call” to buy guns. “One of the things that were finding really troubling is that the gun industry and gun lobby are deliberately targeting and marketing guns to AAPIs, and they’re exploiting our fears since the surge of anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic to encourage more of us to become first time gun owners and to be future pro-gun advocates,” he said. “It’s insidious, but they see us as a potential market.”

Wong said that gun marketers have largely ignored Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders until recently, but demographic changes in the United States have altered that. A January 2023 article in the Los Angeles Times on gun ownership among immigrant communities contains an interview with a gun store owner that appears to reflect some of the more prevalent disinformation narratives circulated in Asian-language communities:

Last week at Arcadia Firearm & Safety, owner David Liu chatted up a chiropractor looking to buy a handgun.

“Gun control is full of s—” Liu said, a Glock 43 pistol strapped to his hip as Athena, a 2-year-old Belgian Malinois, napped nearby. “I told the other media they should worry about online games.”

Liu, 56, opened the gun store in 2016 in the majority-Asian city of Arcadia, in a strip mall that includes two boba tea shops and a Taiwanese beef noodle shop.

A Trump 2020 flag hangs outside the front door, and the store’s name is displayed in English and Chinese.

Inside, an upside down American flag is held up by a rifle, near a Taiwanese flag and a black flag reading “Free Hong Kong, Revolution Now.”

Liu, who was born in Taiwan and moved to Hong Kong at 4, came to the U.S. as a teenager. He thinks the media “blew up” the connection between anti-Asian hate and the increase in Asian American gun ownership.

Rather, he said, people feel unsafe because of an increase in burglaries and other crime, as well as the George Floyd protests of 2020.

About half his clientele is Asian American, he said. Asked if more Asians have come in since the mass shootings, he laughed.

“For the past three years, whoever needed to buy [a gun] already bought [it],” he said.

He has, however, seen an increase in inquiries about getting a concealed carry permit.

“When you are protecting your family, protecting your business, what does a gun do for you? You protect your community,” Liu said.

Those fighting these toxic narratives (in any language) are under-resourced and overextended, adding yet another complication to fighting well-marketed disinformation campaigns with millions of dollars behind them and powerful influencers busily leveraging the fear and rage they generate. Debunkers, community members, and Chinese language journalists have been dedicated to fact checking, said Jinxia Niu, but they need broader support; they are targeted with violence and racism as well as pressures from within their own communities.

On the other hand, disinformation purveyors are thriving. “They’ve been well resourced, well funded… they have tons of money and political connections there,” Niu said.

That means there is an urgent need for investment and community training so that people know how to find trustworthy sources. And without broader support from the American media and more responsible and thorough coverage,  disinformation everywhere — in any language — will continue to thrive.

The post Mass Shootings, Violence in California Highlight Issue of Disinformation in Immigrant Communities appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, brazil, disinformation, donald trump, eduardo bolsonaro, global far-right power grab, Government, international, jair bolsonaro, january 6 2021, january 8 2023, lula, reporting, social media, steve bannon, Terrorism, trump, TruthOrFiction, War

Brazil Insurrection Had Familiar Faces, Themes

A January 8 2023 attempted right-wing coup in Brazil’s capital Brasília followed the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (popularly known as “Lula”) over right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in the South American nation’s presidential elections.

The violent uprising, which took place a week after Lula’s inauguration ceremony, bore a striking resemblance to a similar insurrection in the United States two years before — and with good reason, as it was planned, structured, and executed in much the same way:

In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s violent attacks on Brazil’s Congress and other government buildings, the country’s social media channels surged with calls to attack gas stations, refineries and other infrastructure, as well as for people to come to a “war cry party” in the capital, according to Brazilian social media researchers.

[…]

Organizers on Telegram posted dates, times and routes for “Liberty Caravans” that would pick people up in at least six Brazilian states and ferry them to the party, according to posts viewed by The Washington Post. One post said: “Attention Patriots! We are organizing for a thousand buses. We need 2 million people in Brasília.”

The “caravans” and the planning and language around them in the Brasília attacks were very similar to those around the “Million MAGA March” in Washington, DC in November 2020, one of the events that preceded the January 6 2021 insurrection:

This Is Not the ‘Million MAGA March’ on Washington in November 2020

It also echoed (debunked) claims of “2 million” people who joined anti-vaccine caravans in Ottawa, Canada, in February 2022:

‘2 Million People Are in the Streets of Ottawa Demanding Their Freedom’

The violent uprising in Brasília was, like the January 6 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, accompanied by disinformation campaigns and preceded by escalating violent rhetoric and agitprop on social media for years beforehand, some of which was fannall of which should be recognizable to English-speaking readers:

Lula’s election win, which came with the slimmest margin in a generation, was quickly recognized by politicians across the spectrum and governments around the world. But Bolsonaro never conceded defeat.

His allies filed a lawsuit to annul a batch of votes, but the case was quickly dismissed, spurring more protests.

Some tactics looked strikingly similar to those used in the U.S. after the 2020 presidential election. In one case, truck drivers and diehard Bolsonaro fans caused national transportation nightmares by blocking roads in over a dozen Brazilian states, prompting the Supreme Court to issue orders to federal highway police.

QAnon has also been a major motivator for the Brazilian far right:

The sheer volume of online conspiracies circulating in Brazil is hard to overstate. Sometimes, they become visible in the real world. One such example occurred during a pro-Bolsonaro protest in the capital, Brasília, last May. Amid the flag-waving car procession, one vehicle had the letter “Q” prominently displayed on the rear window. At the time, most Brazilians had no inkling of what the letter meant. Times have changed, and references to the QAnon conspiracy theory are today splashed across social networks, chatrooms, and messaging apps. There’s even a new self-published e-book, O Movimento Q (“The Q Movement”), seeking to bring the conspiracy to the masses.

Brazil’s version of QAnon has a distinctly pro-Bolsonaro flavor.

QAnon, a weaponized antisemitic conspiracy theory that incorporates elements of blood libel (“cannibal pedophiles“) and fantasies of authoritarian crackdowns into its claims, is not the only narrative that Brazilian disinformation purveyors share with their American counterparts, although it has been a clear and present part of many disinformation campaigns that have erupted from online rhetoric into real-world violence since at least 2020.

The narratives in Brazil were platformed and disseminated by many of the same entities who were responsible for pushing disinformation about the results of the 2020 election in the United States:

“The whole thing smells,” said a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, one day after the first round of voting in the Brazilian election in October [2022].

The race was heading towards a run-off and the final result was not even close to being known. Yet Mr Bannon, as he had been doing for weeks, spread baseless rumours about election fraud.

Across several episodes of his podcast and in social media posts, he and his guests stoked up allegations of a “stolen election” and shadowy forces. He promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring, and continued to encourage opposition even after Mr Bolsonaro himself appeared to accept the results.

Mr Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, was just one of several key allies of Donald Trump who followed the same strategy used to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 US presidential election.

Connections were rife between disinformation purveyors in the United States and Brazil going back a significant amount of time; for example, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a right-wing politician and a son of disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro — whose supporters were responsible for the attack in Brasília — has openly associated with far right American activists several years.

“It was a pleasure to meet STEVE BANNON, strategist in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” the younger Bolsonaro tweeted in August 2018. “We had a great conversation and we share the same worldview. He said to be an enthusiast of Bolsonaro’s campaign and we are certainly in touch to join forces, especially against cultural marxism.”

“Cultural marxism” references yet another longstanding disinformation campaign; like QAnon, it is explicitly and implicitly antisemitic, as this 2003 article from the Southern Poverty Law Center makes clear:

Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it — in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of “cultural Marxism” are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.

In a nutshell, the theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of “Marxism” that took aim at American society’s culture, rather than its economic system.

The theory holds that these self-interested Jews — the so-called “Frankfurt School” of philosophers — planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values — Christianity, “family values,” and so on — are reactionary and bigoted. With their core values thus subverted, the theory goes, Americans would be quick to sign on to the ideas of the far left.

And Brazilian counterdisinformation experts were not caught by surprise by the events of January 8 2023:

Brazilian analysts have long warned of the risk in Brazil of an incident akin to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In the months and weeks leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social media channels were flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and cries for a military coup should Bolsonaro lose the election.

These streams of heavily weaponized rhetoric strongly resemble those inflicted on the United States in the latter half of 2020:

As U.S. Election Looms, Agitprop Floods Social Media Platforms

Meanwhile, Jair Bolsonaro, who left the country just days ahead of the planned right-wing coup, has since been spotted in random places in Florida, such as a fast-food restaurant and wandering through a grocery store:

On 1 January, while Mr da Silva was being sworn in, Mr Bolsonaro was photographed at a Florida KFC with a stringy piece of chicken hanging out of his mouth. More mockery ensued on social media.

Several days later, a video surfaced of Mr Bolsonaro inside a Publix grocery store. It was shot by an unknown individual. In the strange video, the former president appears to be wandering around the store aimlessly. He does not have a cart or appear be shopping. At one point, he inexplicably enters a checkout line despite having no items to purchase. He then leaves the line as abruptly as he entered and begins staring at an endcap near the front of the store.

As news of the Brasília attacks continued to emerge, Jair Bolsonaro claimed that he had to check in to a U.S. hospital to be treated for “severe” abdominal pain:

Bolsonaro has been hospitalized multiple times in recent years with gut blockages after being stabbed while campaigning for the presidency in 2018. He traveled to the United States two days before Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took the office of president.

Additionally, he and his allies, in yet another echo of the disinformation narratives previously weaponized by Donald Trump and his supporters, have unsuccessfully attempted to pin the blame of the January 8th 2023 attack on “the left.”

Brazilian officials have already arrested hundreds of people who reportedly participated in the Brazil insurrection. Some American lawmakers are also calling for the former president, who is already under investigation by multiple agencies in his home country, to be extradited.

The post Brazil Insurrection Had Familiar Faces, Themes appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

agitprop, analysis, building resilience, climate change, disinformation, Entertainment, Identifying Fake News, news media, propaganda, reporting, resilience, resilience targeting, TruthOrFiction, War, weaponized narratives

How to Fight Disinformation — Part V: Resilience Targeting

This is the last in a series about how communities can fight back and protect themselves against weaponized disinformation campaigns. You can read our previous articles here: 

Part I: Firehosing
Part II: Gaslighting
Part III: Distraction
Part IV: Signaling and Dog Whistling

As a damaged and rapidly changing climate creates new, unforeseen issues around the world with wars and power struggles in their wake, it has birthed a new type of attack – one that is all but invisible to many, but which is devastating nevertheless. It is powerful and can destroy communities overnight, and it is being leveraged all over the world.

That tactic called resilience targeting, part of a wider group of emerging hybrid threats. It is a simple enough mechanism — remove your adversary’s ability to recover after a catastrophic event, whoever or whatever that adversary might be — but thanks to social media and climate change, it is now an extraordinarly robust and cost-effective set of weapons. It is also difficult to fight with traditional weapons. By its very nature, much of it takes place at the individual level, in our own minds and perceptions.

This is not an easy concept to describe, largely because there is not yet a robust linguistic or academic framework around it. Therefore, in addition to definitions, we will also offer examples to illustrate hybrid threats, disaster resilience, resilience targeting, and the relationships between the three terms.

What are Hybrid Threats?

Hybrid threats, sometimes also called “blended aggression,” are an emerging front in regions roiled by major natural disasters or heightened tensions:

Hybrid threats combine military and non-military, as well as covert and overt means, including disinformation, cyber attacks, economic pressure, and deployment of irregular armed groups and use of regular forces.

Hybrid activities are often used by adversaries because they realise they cannot prevail in a conventional conflict with NATO, or broadly with the West, or even compete politically, militarily or economically.

Hybrid methods create turmoil and disunity among us—they quietly undermine democratic states and institutions, blur the lines between war and peace, and attempt to sow doubt in the minds of target populations, all while avoiding traditional conflict.

These threats are in our social media feed, usually without our awareness. They are influencing the media and academia. Adversaries use hybrid methods to make us feel unsafe, make it hard for us to distinguish the truth from lies, and erode our trust in our leaders and governments.

They are called “hybrid” or “blended” threats because they blur boundaries, especially between state and non-state actors and combatants versus noncombatants. Resilience targeting is part of that hybrid activity:

The ambiguity is created by combining conventional and unconventional means – disinformation and interference in political debate or elections, critical infrastructure disturbances or attacks, cyber operations, different forms of criminal activities and, finally, an asymmetric use of military means and warfare.

By using the aforementioned unconventional and conventional means in concert, hybrid actors veil their action in vagueness and ambiguity, complicating attribution and response. The use of different intermediaries – or proxy actors – supports the achievement of these goals. Hybrid action is cost-effective as it turns the vulnerabilities of the target into a direct strength for the hybrid actor. This makes hybrid action more difficult to prevent or respond to.

That makes quickly and effectively getting accurate information to populations crucial, particularly during times of flux or great change, so that they can protect themselves during a communications breakdown or other disaster, such as a fire or an earthquake that destroys an aqueduct. Otherwise, those events are harnessed in order to feed divisive rhetoric, as happened during September 2020 wildfires in the American Pacific Northwest, when weaponized, false rumors about anti-fascist protesters led directly to white supremacists organizing roadblocks to pull over people fleeing the flames:

Is ‘Antifa’ Setting Fires in Oregon?

But there do not need to be ongoing, shocking disasters for hybrid threats to be effective; there only needs to be heavy tension and interference in the way information is gathered and disseminated, both of which can be achieved by harnessing propaganda and disinformation narratives. Those can be used to turn the institutions that keep democracy safe and stable by educating the population at large, such as public schools or newsrooms, into places that are pummeled by rhetorical attacks — or fully co-opted by bad actors in order to enact their own agendas:

Tennessee School District Bans ‘Maus,’ a Children’s Book About the Holocaust

As many counterdisinformation experts have repeatedly noted, the rise of these new types of weapons is no accident — rather, it is the result of technology and a rapidly changing climate, which are rapidly redrawing geopolitical powers and borders:

The ongoing transition in international power structures provides a fertile environment for hybrid action. The intensifying conflict of values between the West and authoritarian states erodes international norms and institutions and makes open Western societies targets of comprehensive hybrid action. A conflict of values that extends to the domestic sphere of Western societies increases polarization and disunity within and among Western actors, making them more vulnerable to external interference. Recent developments in modern technology and an increasingly complex information environment provide powerful instruments for hybrid actors if not properly countered by the Western community.

Accordingly, Hybrid CoE characterizes hybrid threats as:

  • Coordinated and synchronized action that deliberately targets democratic states’ and institutions’systemic vulnerabilities through a wide range of means.
  • Activities that exploit the thresholds of detection and attribution, as well as the different interfaces (war-peace, internal-external security, local-state, and national-international).
  • Activities aimed at influencing different forms of decision-making at the local (regional), state, or institutional level, and designed to further and/or fulfil the agent’s strategic goals while undermining and/or hurting the target.

As this 2019 story explains, environmental changes over time translate to major refugee movements as people leave their homes to search for safer places elsewhere:

Climate change is exacerbating already severe droughts in the Horn of Africa. An average 21.8 million people are already forced to leave their homes as a result of climate change – every year. Parts of Southeast Asia risk becoming uninhabitable, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies reports. The Maldives may disappear altogether.

Here’s the thing: people don’t lie down and die when their home community becomes uninhabitable. They find an inhabitable place to live. Climate change risks creating enormous population movements in the direction of North America and Europe. Will those refugees collectively flee to Russia or China as well? Unlikely. Most migrants make their way to a neighboring country – which is why Lebanon and Jordan are now home to so many Syrians – or to countries that hold promise of a significantly better future. Today, that is “the West”.

Since disinformation is inherently centered on people and their basic rights, this creates multiple, overlapping opportunities for resilience targeting. In the United States and in other countries with formerly robust democracies, resilience targeting looks like corrosion or corruption of its democratic institutions — elections, public schools, libraries, unions, and so on.

What Is Disaster Resilience?

The term “disaster resilience,” or simply resilience, can refer to individuals, groups, or societies; it can also describe the environment that people live in. The term means roughly the same thing no matter what context it is deployed in — the ability to bounce back from a setback or a disaster — but it takes on additional, overlapping connotations when used in climate or information issues, specifically the ability for an individual, a group, or a region to return to a baseline of safety or security after a major disaster or calamity.

Interfering with that resilience is a highly cost-effective way to attack populations, which can also set up the public for future disinformation campaigns.

How and Why Are Disasters and Disinformation Connected?

Resilience targeting interferes with that ability to recover, whether physically, emotionally, socially, or geographically.

In practice, environmentally-related resilience targeting might look like refusing to release funds for storm cleanup, or destroying granaries ahead of harvest season during a violent and unprovoked invasion of a neighboring country, or simply elected officials refusing to address an ongoing lack of potable water:

Jackson, Mississippi ‘Indefinitely’ Out of Water

Resilience targeting affects emotional as well as physical states, and one line of attack can be used to support the other. For example, a population exhausted by years of firehosing falsehoods might be less likely to adopt masking in the face of a global airborne pandemic; right-wing groups ginned up by years of weaponized narratives about “antifa” and anti-immigrant messaging might be easily encouraged to set up armed roadblocks during a wildfire or other natural disaster; emboldened conspiracy theorists might heavily recruit using narrative and algorithmic targeting, leading to a society that cannot agree with itself enough to build – or rebuild – democratic institutions and norms:

Virginia Thomas Embraced Conspiracy Theories Long Before ‘Big Lie’ Texts Came to Light

Dr. Chad Briggs, a hybrid threat and climate disinformation expert and co-author of Disaster Security, has written that resilience targeting is a type of attack that is tailored for use in a world in the process of being re-made by climate change and massive technological advances, both of which have taken place in a relatively brief timespan:

In conducting assessments of post-conflict regions and reconstruction, a pattern emerged that suggested many actions taken during a conflict were designed not to target military units, or even civilians directly, but were intended to prevent communities from being able to recover from the conflict. By attacking or blocking access to critical nodes in essential systems, aggressors could exploit key vulnerabilities and actively target those factors that constituted resilience and the ability of systems to recover following a conflict. The specific tactics could vary, from sowing landmines in agricultural areas, destroying environmental or health infrastructure (for example, wastewater treatment facilities), or undercutting livelihoods, this practice of resilience targeting often occurred in civil wars and was tied to policies of ethnic cleansing.

Similar tactics are observed in hybrid warfare environments. Hybrid warfare strategies are often employed in asymmetric conflicts, where the less powerful actor takes advantage of the adversary’s vulnerabilities to create instability and disruption. As resilience is a key component of vulnerability, actively undercutting resilience of critical systems automatically increases associated vulnerabilities, whether the ability to withstand outside attacks, maintain social, political, and economic stability, or to recover following a disaster. In a general sense, any reduction of resilience in a society or its underlying support systems increases that society’s vulnerability to emerging hazards linked to climate change. When Ukrainian society, for example, is polarized through social media and disinformation campaigns, energy utilities suffer cyberattacks, financial systems are delegitimized and fail, the country loses its ability to develop climate mitigation policies or respond to hazards such as extreme heat events.

“Identifying resilience targeting can be tricky, as very often target groups are led to believe that this process is either “just politics” or somehow their own doing,” Briggs told us via email, adding:

“Austerity measures” are a common cover for undermining community resilience, or following a disaster, groups may have land or services taken away for their own protection (e.g. confiscation of land following the 2004 Asian tsunami, or Hurricane Katrina in 2005). Undermining trust in science and local experts is also a common tactic, as it removes the ability to question government or corporate actions. Generally, think of what makes a community resilient in terms of connectivity, trust, access to information, and local resources — once those are deliberately taken away, there is often a goal behind doing so.

There are myriad examples of how this looks in practice in the 2022 election cycle, such as the inauthentically organized narratives about critical race theory, which are and always were simply attacks on public schooling:

The ‘Critical Race Theory’ Coordinated Disinformation Campaign

Or narratives weaponized against students, such as one using a phony and absurd narrative about “litterboxes in classrooms” as a thin pretext for rhetoric and policy decisions targeting queer and transgender youth:

Right-Wing Lawmakers Take Up Spreading Fake ‘Students Identify as Cats’ Rumors

Or anti-masking and anti-vaccine disinformation campaigns:

Anatomy of an Inauthentically Organized Campaign

Which were in turn parlayed into attacks on medical professionals:

Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Campaign Echoes ‘Doctor’s Plot’ Rhetoric

And that was also used to motivate titushki-style mobs in major cities:

The ‘Freedom Convoy’ Ran on Regurgitated Disinformation Narratives

This also can show how these poisoned narratives can effectively play off each other in order to create a sense of an alternate reality — one that is ruled over by disinformation purveyors, and which often has hideous real-world effects that spill out in stochastic violence and bad-faith policies.

Building Resilience

Hybrid threats, including resilience targeting and disinformation campaigns,  look more complicated than they are because they use human nature as their fuel, which is inherently complex and full of different responses. They can also be intentionally terrifying and disorienting, as in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. general election:

As U.S. Election Looms, Agitprop Floods Social Media Platforms

But, as knotty and tangled as disinformation narratives and related campaigns can appear, their solutions are relatively simple and straightforward — although, as with every other aspect of hybrid threats, they may not be easy. Resilience targeting is a combination of disinformation strategies, plus policy changes, violence, and anything else that will keep populations from recovering or progressing after a disastrous event, and as such it requires a multipronged approach for pushing back, but always favoring truth and transparency over manipulation and lies:

How to Fight Disinformation: Introduction and Overview

While these attacks are systemic and have a stated goal of destroying democratic institutions, they can be fought very effectively at the grassroots level by building individual resistance to disinformation campaigns. It can be fought in the same way as any other disinformation campaigns — through a combination of strategies that prioritize accuracy, truth, mutual aid, and protecting the vulnerable, as we have written in the past:

Cultivating radical compassion is one way to counteract the confusion and frustration from the emotional and psychological attacks that are part and parcel of hybrid threats. Reach out to your neighbors, establish mutual aid networks, be kind to one another, but do not tolerate intolerance in your networks and do not be afraid to take time to establish boundaries.

These strategies are part of what has come to be called building resilience, or forming a cultural immune system against disinformation toxicity. Building up institutions — particularly journalism — is essential, but the fight begins at the individual level, which effectively democratizes the response to warfare and threats.

The most potent weapons that disinformation purveyors can deploy against democracy are despair, nihilism, and confusion — especially around elections.  Those are intentional narratives designed to keep people from standing up for their rights and using their voices to shape their surroundings. To put it one final way, it could be argued that disinformation attacks have existed all along for one reason: so that propagandists and liars can separate you from your vote for their own gain by creating an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the interpersonal relationship around which democratic processes are built.

Don’t let them.

The post How to Fight Disinformation — Part V: Resilience Targeting appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, capitol insurrection, disinformation, Identifying Fake News, January 6 Capitol Riot, january 6 commission, news media, propaganda, reporting, republicans, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, trump, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, War

Fifth January 6 Hearing Shows Scope of Attempts to Undermine Democracy

The fifth hearing by the January 6 2021 committee covered the pressure that Donald Trump exerted on state and federal officials to call the U.S. presidential election in his favor in 2020 so that he could remain in power.

The testimonials came on June 23 2022, after a morning of unfolding stories related to the January 6 2021 attempted coup at the United States Capitol building, an event which was the violent culmination of these targeted, weaponized rhetoric and narratives in the service of discrediting the election results:

The hearing kicked off mere hours after federal investigators raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, who was one of the key Justice Department figures who was involved in Trump’s schemes. He has denied any wrongdoing related to January 6.

Three Trump appointees testified in-person on Thursday, joining a growing list of Republicans who have gone under oath to provide damning information about Trump’s post-election shenanigans. The witnesses were former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel, who led the department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

During the hearings, Rosen said that there was a significant effort to get the Justice Department to confiscate voting machines, which they refused to do; the administration also asked them to send letters to various state legislatures, such as Georgia. The Justice Department refused.

The draft of a five-page unsent letter intended for Georgia officials (dated December 28 2020) fully reflects many of the disinformation campaigns that were being circulated publicly by Donald Trump and his circles at that time, showing a clear goal of undermining the public’s faith in American democratic institutions concurrently with the pressure campaign:

Dear Governor Kemp, Mr. Speaker, and Mr. President Pro Tempore:

The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States. The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia. No doubt, many of Georgia’s state legislators are aware of irregularities, sworn to by a variety of witnesses, and we have taken notice of their complaints.

[…]

The Department believes that in Georgia and several other States, both a slate of electors supporting Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump, gathered on that day at the proper location to cast their ballots, and that both sets of those ballots have been transmitted to Washington, D.C., to be opened by Vice President Pence.

[…]

The Department also finds troubling the current posture of a pending lawsuit in Fulton County, Georgia, raising several of the voting irregularities pertaining to which candidate for President of the United States received the most lawfully cast votes in Georgia. See Trump o. Raffensperger, 2020cv343255 (Fulton Cty. Super. Ct.). Despite the action having been filed on December 4, 2020, the trial court there has not even scheduled a hearing on [the] matter, making it difficult for the judicial process to consider this evidence and resolve these matters on appeal prior to January 6….

The letter, like the testimonials, underlined how disinformation narratives are used as justification for acts intended to undermine democratic institutions and attack democracy outright – in this case, by denying or ignoring the will of the voting public.

The hearings also revealed that multiple Republican members of Congress asked for post-insurrection pardons, indicating (among other things) that the disinformation and propaganda campaigns were not disseminated in good faith:

Several top Trump aides during the post-Jan. 6 period, including special assistant Cassidy Hutchinson and aide Johnny McEntee, described outreach to White House officials from multiple members of Congress seeking clemency: Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

Additionally, according to the former Trump aides’ testimony, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) sent an email on Jan. 11, 2021, asking for “all purpose” pardons for every lawmaker who objected to electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) never asked for a pardon but did request an update on the status of requests by other members, Hutchinson said.

The flurry of pardon requests followed what the select committee showed was weeks of efforts by Trump’s top congressional Republican defenders to spread misinformation about the results of the 2020 election. Those GOP lawmakers also helped apply pressure on the Justice Department to legitimize those false fraud claims. None of the lawmakers ever received pardons.

Here are some of the relevant “voter fraud” narratives that involved Georgia that we debunked and contextualized at that time, in chronological order:

‘Special Paper,’ ‘Watermarked Ballots’ Conspiracy Theory Spreads on Social Media

Did Monitors Discover a 9,626 Vote Error in the DeKalb County, Georgia Recount?

Trump Tweets About ‘Fake Water Main Break’ on Election Night in Georgia

‘BREAKING: State of Georgia Issues Huge Announcement, Will Conduct Statewide Signature Audit’

Are Georgia Runoff Voters Being Told Voting Machines Are ‘Malfunctioning’?

Trump also tweeted in more generalized terms about the election, pushing narratives deeply entrenched in existing weaponized campaigns, to further the ongoing attacks on democracy. As we wrote in an analysis at the time:

The final goal of such sustained efforts is to destroy faith in institutions, thereby destroying entire countries from within by creating an environment in which the fundamental trust between individuals and governments necessary for social cohesion in liberal democracies can no longer exist. From this perspective, these ongoing denials of the reality of the election’s results can be viewed not simply as one man lashing out in denial as enablers look on, but an ongoing act of aggression against the American people and their long-cherished democratic systems, using social media platforms and their algorithms as both vehicles and enthusiastic enablers for disinformation campaigns.

Whatever their motivations, the way to counteract these threats remains the same. Hybrid threats can be countered by building resilience — in other words, creating and strengthening national (and international) responses to disinformation campaigns and attacks from the ground up with a combination of vetted, credible, transparent actions by institutions, strong and independent journalism unfettered by government censorship or political intimidation, and an overall refusal by individuals and entire institutions to cave to lies uttered by bad-faith bullies. Without resilience and clarity, there is no democracy at all.

The next hearings are now scheduled for July.

The post Fifth January 6 Hearing Shows Scope of Attempts to Undermine Democracy appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

election disinformation, house, january 6 2021, January 6 Capitol Riot, january 6 commission, public hearings, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, trump administration, TruthOrFiction

Jan. 6 Hearings: Disinformation Powered Trump’s Push to Overturn Election

The fourth public hearing organized by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol on June 21 2022 examined how disinformation and smear campaigns were wielded to pressure state officials and private individuals to help him overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The most chilling stories came from private citizens Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, both election workers who were attacked by weaponized disinformation campaigns spurred in part by a  phony “confession” posted to Instagram in Freeman’s name, which we debunked in December 2020:

‘RubyFreeman_Georgia’ Instagram Post

The harassment escalated thanks to feverish far-right websites, Donald Trump’s tweets, and Rudy Giuliani, until both mother and daughter felt unsafe everywhere they want. Freeman told the committee that because of the threats, she had to give up her entire life’s work and identity. “I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” she testified. “For my entire professional life, I was Lady Ruby”:

My community in Georgia, where I was born and lived my whole life, new me as Lady Ruby. I built my own business around that name, Ruby’s Unique Treasures. A pop-up shop catering to ladies with unique fashions. I wore a shirt that proudly proclaimed that I was, and I am, Lady Ruby. Actually, I had that shirt on. I had that shirt in every color. I wore that shirt on election day, 2020. I have not worn it since and I will never wear it again.

“There is nowhere I feel safe,” she said. “Nowhere.”

Moss, like her mother, said that she was forced to stop doing work that she loved because of the racist attacks and harassment brought on by the disinformation circulated about them:

Moss, who testified in person on Tuesday, described the moment she discovered she’d been receiving myriad “racist” and “hateful” threats on Facebook’s Messenger application.

“I went to that icon and there was just a lot of horrible things,” Moss said. “A lot of threats, wishing death upon me, telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’”

I’ve gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second guess everything that I do. It’s affected my life in a — in a major way. In every way. All because of lies. For me doing my job, same thing I’ve been doing forever.

Moss and her mother were targeted and harassed relentlessly after Rudy Giuliani, who was advising Trump on how to overturn the results of the 2020 election, used video footage of the pair working during the election count to push lies about the results.

Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers (R) also testified, saying that Donald Trump’s attempt to pressure election officials to call the election in his favor was “a tragic parody.”

Bowers detailed a harassment campaign against not just him but his family and neighbors and attacking him using QAnon-style narratives that should by now be exceedingly familiar to anyone following American politics:

“You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath,” he said he told Trump and Giuliani, to which the former New York mayor said: “Aren’t we all Republicans here? I would think we’d get a better reception.”

[…]

Bowers told the committee that his office was subject to over 20,000 emails, thousands of voicemails and texts from those who believed he was wrong to not recall the electors.

“Up until recently, it is a new pattern in our lives to worry what will happen on Saturdays,” he said about his family. “Because we have various groups come by.”

Groups have video trucks accusing Bowers of being a pedophile and corrupt politician, blaring loudspeakers and threatening him and his neighbors.

In recent years, baseless “pedophilia” and “groomer” smears have been increasingly leveled against teachers, doctors, scientists, journalists, LGBTQ people, and anybody else in the sights of far right disinformation campaigns and power grabs leveraging inauthentically organized moral panics from PizzaGate to QAnon and beyond:

After Josh Hawley (R-MO) falsely accused [Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown] Jackson of giving child pornographers unusually lenient sentences and “soft” treatment, other conservatives, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, ran with the idea that Jackson and anyone who supported her confirmation was supporting or sympathetic to pedophilia.

The result of this fear-mongering is grim: Vice reports that users of extremist right-wing websites like Patriot.win recently tried to publicize the address of a school superintendent who they claimed was “grooming” children. In March, the superintendent placed a school nurse on leave for allegedly making inappropriate statements on Facebook about a student who may have been receiving gender-affirming care.

Claiming the superintendent was “supporting leftist grooming in her schools” by implicitly protecting the welfare of a potentially trans student, one Patriot.win user wrote that she “needs to be executed by our judicial system.”

This type of smear reliably incites violence against people who have been targeted by the rhetoric.

Bowers said that the smears also extended to his gravely ill daughter, who he said was deeply distressed by the harassment in the months before her death.

Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who was a frequent target of Trump’s tweets trying to publicly pressure him into changing the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election after he maintained that there was no fraud, also testified about the “disgusting” slurs and harassment he and his family received:

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger testified under oath and under subpoena alongside his top election officer Gabriel Sterling. The committee is probing the riot at the capitol that came just four days after former President Trump called Raffensperger – and implored him to find enough votes to swing Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump.

“What are we gonna do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes.  Fellas I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break,” Trump said in a recorded phone call.

As Raffensperger and Sterling refused Trump’s demand, tensions heightened. Trump rallied his supporters to back his false claims of voter fraud.  And Raffensperger told the committee Trump backers started in on his family.

“And my wife started getting texts. They were typically sexualized texts which were disgusting,” Raffensperger told the committee.  “They started going after her to get to me – why don’t you quit and just walk away. So that happened. And then some people broke into my daughter-in-law’s home,” he said.

That harassment was bolstered by the circulation of weaponized disinformation campaigns via botnets, blogs, and others, as we covered throughout 2021:

‘Trump Got 74 Million Votes With 133 Million Registered Voters in the USA … There’s Only 59 Million Votes Left for Biden, How Did He Get 81 Million?’

Trump also made these claims publicly via social media and at rallies:

Trump’s Disinformation Spree After Losing Election Propelled by Social Media

The rhetoric culminated in the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6 2021:

Who Saved the Electoral Ballots During the Capitol Riots?

The House committee also played audio of Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State investigator Frances Watson to call the election in his favor:

Trump also tried to sway Frances Watson, who was then the chief investigator of the Investigations Division for the Office of the Georgia Secretary of State, into tipping the outcome of her probe in his favor. “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised,” Trump told her in a recorded conversation.

Ultimately, three vote counts by the Georgia secretary of state found that Trump “came up short,” Raffensperger said. He noted that he and his office “followed” the law and the Constitution.

The hearing can be viewed here. The fifth January 6th Committee hearing is scheduled for Thursday, January 23 2022.

Our stories on election disinformation can be found here.

The post Jan. 6 Hearings: Disinformation Powered Trump’s Push to Overturn Election appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, capitol, capitol insurrection, Capitol Riot, coup attempt, disinformation, january 6 2021, january 6 commission, news media, reporting, russia, social media, Terrorism, trump, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, War

Third January 6 Hearings Looks at Pressure, Disinformation Campaigns to Overturn Election

The third hearing by the House committee investigating the January 6 2021 insurrection focused on the pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election — and the deeply corrosive weaponized narratives which undergirded the attempt.

The June 16 2022 hearing focused in on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to privately and publicly strongarm then-Vice President Mike Pence into delaying or outright rejecting the election results and appointing Trump president over the will of the voters, who decisively elected Democrat Joe Biden.

The hearing focused in on two advisers to the former vice president, who appeared in person:

Greg Jacob, Pence’s former counsel, and J. Michael Luttig, a highly respected conservative jurist and retired federal judge who advised Pence in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The committee also showed taped footage of interviews with Pence chief of staff Marc Short and other aides.

The testimony made clear that Pence and his closest aides repeatedly told Trump and his allies that a theory pushed by conservative lawyer John Eastman, who argued the vice president should single-handedly reject or replace slates of electors, had no basis in the Constitution or federal law.

The committee presented evidence that Eastman himself knew the plan violated the law. Nevertheless, Trump continued to pressure Pence to intervene, including in a heated phone call on the morning of the attack.

That same morning, even as Pence was issuing a public statement saying he intended to certify the election results, which were legitimate, Trump addressed the crowd in front of the White House, saying that if Pence did not do what he wished, “I won’t like him as much.”

Trump then turned to social media, providing the crowds of fans gathered outside – who were already primed from years-long diets of propaganda and weaponized narratives such as QAnon and other agitprop – the cue they needed in order to fully transform from an unruly, disruptive crowd into a violent mob.

As U.S. Election Looms, Agitprop Floods Social Media Platforms

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” Trump tweeted, “giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

His supporters ran with it:

In one video played by the committee, a Trump supporter said he had heard reports that Pence had “caved,” and if he did they were going to drag “politicians through the streets.” As Pence evacuated the Senate and hid in the Capitol, rioters in front of the building chanted “bring him out!” A fake guillotine was constructed on the National Mall, and people breaking into the building chanted “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”

The committee also played videos of individual Trump supporters stating their views on what they had by then decided was Pence’s treachery.  “Mike Pence has betrayed this president, and he has betrayed the people of the United States and we will never ever forget,” said one.“It’s real simple, Pence betrayed us,” said another supporter from inside the Capitol.

The roles of election denial and other disinformation narratives in the violent insurrection was immediately clear to those who had been following the rhetoric, such as Darrell M. West of the Brookings Institution, who wrote on January 11 2021:

A stunned nation could not believe the mob violence, desecration of a federal building, and the temporarily successful effort to halt the legislative process. It was the first time since the War of 1812 that the Capitol had been overrun, only this time, it was not a foreign enemy that had occupied the space but fellow Americans. It was the ultimate polarization of Americans turning against other Americans and engaging in violence that resulted in death and injury.

Yet on social media, Trump supporters continue to spread outright lies. People I know argue that the violence was committed by ultra-liberal antifa supporters who infiltrated what they claimed was a peaceful Trump protest. Others are telling their friends to shut off the automatic update feature of their phones because the operators are going to remove Trump’s access to the emergency broadcasting system. Some even suggest that some of the more extreme actions were staged and did not take place in the way they are being depicted by the news media.

And the disinformation campaigns against the 2020 U.S. election have not stopped. In fact, they have metastasized into an entire slate of election deniers running on Republican tickets all over the United States — showing how difficult it can be to get these sorts of corrosive narratives out of politics once they are allowed in:

Republican voters this week picked Nevada businessman Jim Marchant as their nominee for secretary of state, bringing yet another 2020 election denier closer to overseeing elections in 2024 in a presidential battleground state.

Last month, Pennsylvania Republicans chose as their gubernatorial nominee a staunch defender of former President Donald Trump and his election falsehoods.

And in New Mexico this week, a GOP-led county commission refused to certify the results of the June 7 primary election in the county, citing concerns about election fraud. The move prompted legal action from Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who this fall will face a Republican rival who has called the 2020 election that Trump lost a “coup” and has argued that vote-tallying machines manipulate election results.

The next hearing is scheduled for June 21 2022. It is expected to detail the Trump administration’s efforts to influence state legislators and election officials to allow him to remain in power despite losing to Joe Biden.

The post Third January 6 Hearings Looks at Pressure, Disinformation Campaigns to Overturn Election appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, bill barr, Bill Stepien, Crime / Police, disinformation, donald trump, election fraud, foreign interference, Government, Identifying Fake News, january 6 2021, January 6 Capitol Riot, january 6 commission, news media, Peter Navarro, reporting, republicans, rudy giuliani, russia, Sidney Powell, social media, Stop The Steal, trump, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, War

Disinformation Takes Center Stage at January 6 Committee Hearings

The role of weaponized disinformation campaigns in the January 2021 attempted coup at the United States Capitol was the main topic at the second January 6 Committee hearing about the events that culminated in a violent insurrection.

The House select committee’s June 13 2022 public testimonials focused mainly on recounting the behavior of former U.S. President Donald Trump and his colleagues over the results of the 2020 general election when it became clear that the Trump administration was losing his re-election bid.

Witnesses such as former United States Attorney General William Barr and former aide Bill Stepien and Jason Miller described an atmosphere of rising panic and refusal to look at the reality of Trump’s election loss among many of Trump’s associates, particularly Peter Navarro, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani — who, according to witnesses, was visibly intoxicated when he urged Trump to declare victory on election night:

“The mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s reelection campaign, said during his videotaped deposition played by the committee.

[…]

Mayor Giuliani was saying we won it, they’re stealing it from us, where’d all the votes come from, we need to go say that we won. And essentially, that anyone who didn’t agree with that position was being weak,” Miller said.

Stepien said he strongly urged Trump not to declare victory. But Giuliani eventually got to the president. And Trump overruled his advisers.

“My recommendation was to say that votes were still being counted, it’s too early to tell,” he said. “The president disagreed with that. He thought I was wrong. He told me so.”

Trump ended up declaring victory early the next morning, despite the uncertainty of the election results that were in the process of giving way to the reality of his unmistakable loss:

“A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise [people who voted for me] and we won’t stand for this,” Trump told supporters in the White House shortly before 2:30 a.m.

More than an hour earlier, Democrat Joe Biden told supporters he’s confident about winning the presidential election and urged Americans to be patient.

In his East Wing comments, Trump said: “We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything, and all of a sudden it was just called off.”

“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop,” Trump continued more than an hour after the final U.S. polls closed in Alaska. “We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”

Weaponized lies clearly intended to set the stage for undermining the results of the presidential election had been circulated for months ahead of November 2020, along with highly corrosive and inflammatory agitprop:

As the corrosive claims propaganda purveyors and well-known sites make continue to be faithfully debunked by increasingly exhausted and slimed fact-checkers, debunkers, and other journalists, a new disinformation narrative has emerged. This is characterized by the discussion of a new civil war not just as a possibility but an inevitability, ascribed to a shadowy and nebulous “global Left” or the pejorative “Democrat Party.” They appear on Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter, Telegram, Gab, MeWe, and other, more esoteric social media sites.

Many are in the forms of commentary, but others are calls to action.

From this bubbling cauldron of disinformation emerged old Kremlin-style conspiracy theories, as Trump’s team cast about for reasons for his loss….

As U.S. Election Looms, Agitprop Floods Social Media Platforms

Long-circulated (and long-debunked) weaponized conspiracy theories, some years old, were also massaged, edited, and called back into service, such as the well-worn chestnut of “illegal votes” cast fraudulently en masse for Democratic Party candidates:

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot heard recorded testimony on Monday from President Donald Trump’s ex-campaign manager Bill Stepien, who described pursuing a “wild claim” that was brought to Trump about illegal votes in Arizona.

Stepien said there were reports of thousands of illegal votes in that state and someone had “thrown out that claim to President Trump.”

Stepien asked others to look at the claim, and the response he received was that there was nothing to it. The votes, he said, were from overseas, not illegally cast.

U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who was running that part of the hearing, said Trump was frustrated by the response and replaced the legal team.

That claim went on to motivate Trump supporters in Arizona and beyond to push another initiative called “Stop the Steal,” which was enthusiastically picked up and pushed by foreign influencers, according to social media analysts Graphika:

The newly-identified activity discussed in this report shows that suspected Russian actors retooled and doubled down on efforts to target far-right American audiences after their previous activities were disrupted ahead of the 2020 U.S. election. The actors’ continued presence on alternative platforms that lack rigorous policies on foreign interference has also allowed them to create a direct line to these communities, through which to deliver a stream of tailor-made political content. The sometimes skeptical reaction they received, however, and a failure to achieve significant traction illustrates the operators’ long-standing struggle with content quality and authenticity.

Our report details the following key findings:

  • Graphika has identified a sustained effort to target far-right communities on alternative online platforms. The campaign is most active on patriots[.]win (a discussion forum previously hosted on Reddit as r/The_Donald and then independently at thedonald[.]win), where it utilizes a set of 20 inauthentic accounts as messaging vectors and amplifiers. All but one of the accounts were created in a three-hour window on Nov. 5, two days after the U.S. election.

In our own analysis of this particular attempt to sway the election in Donald Trump’s favor, or at least introduce enough chaos and doubt into the minds of Americans to destroy their faith in democratic insitutions such as the electoral system, we noted that “stolen election” narratives appeared to be getting particular boosts from foreign influence and interference agents:

….the content did not pressure nor encourage Americans to behave in any particular way, instead focusing on disseminating crude but effective political cartoons about various public figures in the service of weaponized narratives, such as “Stop the Steal” and the disinformation-driven “audit” of ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County:

In that way, operatives provided a counterpoint of sorts to the drumbeat of plans that were coalescing into what became the Capitol attack. However, this particular network did not post about those plans directly. The content appeared on sites such as TheDonald.win, Gab, and Parler before it was shepherded into the mainstream….

The June 13 2022 statements in their aggregate painted a picture of a president who was not just detached from reality, but one who had, in former U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s words, “never had any interest in what the actual facts were” to begin with.

“There was an avalanche of all these allegations of fraud that built up over a number of days,” Barr said, describing himself as “demoralized” by Trump’s eagerness to seize on conspiracy theories to justify staying in power, which he described to the committee as “completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation”:

Claims that the voting machines of Dominion Voting Systems had been tampered with were woven into one of the biggest conspiracy theories to come out of the 2020 election. Dominion later sued Fox in a $1.6 billion defamation suit that is still pending.

Even before the polls closed on Nov. 3, Trump had discussed the potential voter fraud, and for weeks after he floated various allegations of how the election was “stolen” that were eventually debunked. Of all Trump’s allegations, Barr found those related to Dominion the most disturbing.

“Disturbing in the sense that I saw actually zero basis for the allegations,” he said, “but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people.”

Barr added that he told Trump that the allegations were “bullshit.” It made no difference, he said. In late December 2020, Barr resigned from the Trump administration.

Donald Trump also used election lies to fundraise for a nonexistent political action committee, the “Official Election Defense Fund.” He raised $250 million through that nonexistent fund, which he then funneled to his existing Save America PAC instead of channeling it into litigation, as promised:

“Not only was there the Big Lie, there was the Big Ripoff,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) near the end of the Jan. 6 committee’s second hearing in laying out how the Trump campaign scammed money from supporters over false claims of election fraud.

The Trump campaign sent “millions” of emails to Trump supporters about how they needed to “step up” to protect election integrity, according to the Jan. 6 committee. The money would go to the so-called the “Official Election Defense Fund” — which doesn’t appear to have actually existed, according to testimony.

The fund — which, again, did not actually exist — raised $250 million, most of which did not go to election litigation, but to Trump’s newly created Save America PAC. The PAC then made contributions to Mark Meadows’ charity, to a conservative organization employing former Trump staffers, to the Trump Hotel Collection, and to the company that organized the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol last Jan. 6.

The next televised hearings are scheduled for June 15 2022 at 10AM Eastern time and June 16 2022 at 1PM Eastern time. They are expected to further detail disinformation and pressure campaigns to reinstall Donald Trump in power — over the wishes of a clear majority of American voters.

The post Disinformation Takes Center Stage at January 6 Committee Hearings appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

book bans, brevard county, censorship, disinformation, florida, indiana, kurt vonnegut, kurt vonnegut museum and library, moms for liberty, reporting, TruthOrFiction

Book Lovers Fight Back Against Banning Attempts

As the far right’s attempts to ban books continues throughout the country, book lovers are fighting back.

The latest attempt to ban Kurt Vonnegut’s works for “obscenity” has been challenged by both a Florida English teacher and a group dedicated to maintaining the late author’s legacy.

Far right astroturfing group Moms for Liberty, whose members rode waves of inauthentic moral panics into positions on school boards, has pivoted from spreading disinformation and baseless fearmongering about face masks and critical race theory directly to attempting to ban classic books and replace them with far right propaganda.

Anatomy of an Inauthentically Organized Campaign

One of their latest literary targets, Kurt Vonnegut’s classic anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, is an old favorite of book banners, apparently because of its “strong language” and even stronger anti-fascist messaging:

The book was banned in Levittown, New York in 1975, North Jackson, Ohio, in 1979, and Lakeland, Florida, in 1982 for its “explicit sexual scenes, violence, and obscene language.” Slaughterhouse-Five was challenged as recently as 2007 in a school district in Howell, Michigan because the book contained “strong sexual content.” Upon reviewing the book, the county prosecutor concluded, “After reading the books in question, it is clear that the explicit passages illustrated a larger literary, artistic or political message and were not included solely to appeal to the prurient interests of minors.” A conclusion we can only suspect must have horrified Mr. Vonnegut.

Some sentences worthy of censorship:

As part of the gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger — from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty. The gun lapped up snow and vegetation with a blowtorch thirty feet long. The flame left a black arrow on the ground, showing the Germans exactly where the gun was hidden. The shot was a miss.

When Brevard County, Florida teacher Adam Tritt was ordered to remove Slaughterhouse-Five from his curriculum as a result of the Heritage-affiliated far right group’s complaints in May 2022, he organized a fundraiser to get banned books to students:

Hi. I’m Adam. I’m an Advanced Placement English teacher, author, college instructor, and elected official in Brevard County, Florida. The Spacecoast. Books have been taken out of use in our school classrooms, libraries, and our online student-access ebook library has been removed totally. Many of our students cannot afford to buy these books. I want to help.

I plan to purchase used copies (locally, whenever available) to distribute to age-appropriate students at various locations in our county over the sunmer. Slaughterhouse-Five, Handmaid’s Tale, The Kite Runner, etc.. If Brevard has removed it, I will make it available, getting as many as I can into as many hands as I can. I will enlist the help of many local businesses as distribution points and I’d love your help to get this done.

The fundraiser, which is still ongoing, has been successful enough that Moms for Liberty took notice, with members of one of its Facebook groups promptly smearing Tritt as a “groomer” in order to attempt to taint his motives:

“Warnings to our children…1994: Don’t take candy from strangers. 2022: Don’t take pornographic books from strangers.” the Brevard Moms for Liberty chapter wrote on its Facebook page in response to Tritt’s book drive.

A lengthy and sometimes ugly debate followed, with some people comparing Tritt to a list of teacher sex offenders, and others calling him a “groomer” — a derogatory term used to describe people befriending children for exploitation or abuse.

[…]

Moms for Liberty has challenged 41 books in Brevard libraries, saying the books contain sexual content not meant for children. The chapter’s decision to challenge “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut sparked outrage from teachers and community members; the chapter said some of the books it has challenged may be appropriate for some high school students, but the district should reevaluate which age levels access the challenged works.

Attacking people by baselessly calling them “groomers” or “pedophiles” is a recycled right-wing tactic from the Satanic Panic years. It was originally reserved for LGBTQ people, but its use has now expanded to an all-purpose epithet and threat to level at anyone or anything with whom the far right disagrees:

Framing homosexuality as a wicked specter and queer people as pedophiles is one of the oldest narratives in the homophobic playbook; proponents of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and other recent anti-gay and anti-trans legal actions across the US have been all too happy to recycle it. Only now, due to the paranoiac tendency of the modern right wing, it’s also being expanded and applied to LGBTQ allies, to educators whose work gets caught in the cultural crossfire, and to liberals writ large.

The story of the book ban reached the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, a decade-plus-old organization in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is dedicated not just to Vonnegut’s writing, but also to supporting the principles he championed, chief among them – naturally – the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

The Vonnegut Library joined the fight, with its chief executive officer Julia Whitehead issuing an open letter pledging to donate books to any students who want them and are unable to find or buy them, and addressing Moms for Liberty directly:

You have misunderstood the meaning of the word “liberty.” Removing someone else’s privilege of reading a book is an act that is worthy of rebellion. But we don’t actually have to rebel because these are our rights as Americans. We just simply have to help the school officials and elected officials to understand that the Constitution is our law of the land. The whims of one group of moms is not the law of our land. I know – I’m also the mom of teens. I’ll be sure to put them to work to assist with this effort to help others access books. As former war General and President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go into your public library and read every book.”

Julia Whitehead, who is also the founder of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library and author of the book Breaking Down Vonnegut, told us that the actions to ban books flies in the face of democracy and the rights enshrined by the United States Constitution.

“There’s so much other work that could be done with our time, but we have to pause the progress to stamp out the regression,” she said. “It’s so annoying.”

Whitehead added that while they have fought book bans in the past, this time feels different – more organized and sustained than before. She also said that there is an element of shaming to this effort; as with the “groomer” smears, there is a deliberate attempt to make those defending First Amendment rights as though they are doing something shameful, even obscene, by ensuring that young readers have access to the literature they want to read.

But there is an element of obscenity to it, said Whitehead.

“It is shameful,” she said. “It is shameful that they want to take the constitutional rights away from other people. There is certainly nothing shameful about a book written by a soldier who fought against fascism… Now they’re trying to stifle reading by an American soldier because they’re using profanity? That’s shameful.”

The effects of banning books go far beyond simply not being able to get reading materials, however. There is a ripple effect to telling stories about the world – and there is one when you stop those stories from being told, Whitehead said:

We do workshops, we go into schools. Because it’s one thing to be a Vonnegut superfan or have just read something by Vonnegut. It’s a completely other and more important thing to write yout story… create your beautiful piece of artwork, whether it’s about what you read or whether it’s about your own personal trauma. That’s the magic of Vonnegut – it’s not just about Vonnegut. That’s why Moms 4 Liberty are never going to understand this backlash against their efforts to take other peoples’ rights away. They just don’t get it.

Anyone who wishes to support this effort to get banned books out to students in Florida and beyond can donate money, time, or books through VonnegutLibrary.org or contact info@VonnegutLibrary.org for more information. Adam Tritt’s GoFundMe can be found here.

The post Book Lovers Fight Back Against Banning Attempts appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, Crime / Police, disinformation, news media, reporting, russia, Terrorism, trump, TruthOrFiction, War

Los Angeles County Sheriff Announces Plans to ‘Investigate’ Journalist Over Articles

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has announced plans to target a journalist for an “investigation” over her reporting on their treatment of a man in custody.

Conspiracy theory-slinging Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva held a press conference to announce his intention to target Los Angeles Times reporter Alene Tchekmedyian over her ongoing coverage of a deputy kneeling on a man’s head in March 2021 — and a subsequent cover-up by the department.

Tchekmedyian had followed a story for months about L.A. County sheriff’s deputies restraining a man they had in custody by kneeling on his head for more than three minutes in March 2021. She had written an article the day before the April 26 2022 press conference about a claim that the cover-up had taken place specifically at the sheriff’s behest:

In the legal claim against L.A. County, which is a required precursor to a lawsuit, Allen Castellano offered new details about Villanueva’s alleged role in keeping the March 2021 incident under wraps that contradict the sheriff’s claim that he learned of the incident several months after it happened.

According to the claim, Villanueva, along with a lieutenant working as his aide, Undersheriff Tim Murakami and Assistant Sheriff Robin Limon, viewed a video of the incident just five days after it occurred.

After watching, Villanueva allegedly said to the group, “We do not need bad media at this time,” and told Limon that he would “handle the matter,” the claim said.

“Villanueva really meant that he would proceed to obstruct justice and direct a cover up of the incident,” the claim alleged.

According to the claim, Villanueva wanted to tamp down negative or critical coverage of his department because he feared losing political capital; additionally, he apparently had concerns that the public at large would compare the treatment of the man in custody to George Floyd’s murder:

The man in custody, Enzo Escalante, suffered minor injuries. Deputy Douglas Johnson was holding the handcuffed Escalante down with his knee after he had punched the deputy in the face.

In his whistleblower lawsuit, Commander Allen Castellano claims he immediately sent the video of the March 10, 2021 incident, which was obtained by LAist, up the chain of command to Assistant Sheriff Robin Limon.

[…]

“Sheriff Villanueva blocked and stalled an investigation into an excessive Use of Force (“UOF”) incident to obstruct justice and avoid bad publicity for his re-election campaign,” the lawsuit claims. Villanueva faces eight challengers in the June primary.

During the press conference, Sheriff Alex Villanueva also announced his intent to investigate a political rival and the Inspector-General as well as Tchekmedyian, accusing all three of being part of a conspiracy to discredit him:

But in a Tuesday press conference to address “false claims made in a recent lawsuit filed by a disgruntled employee,” Villanueva again denied those allegations before offering a timeline of events following the use of force incident—which, according to Tchekmedyian’s reporting, the sheriff and a lieutenant learned about just five days after it occurred. Villanueva then showed a slide including a press photo of Tchekmedyian, who was present at the press conference, alongside Eliezer Vera, a chief in the Sheriff’s Department who is running against Villanueva to lead it, and Max Huntsman, its Inspector General—who were both involved at one point in the investigation into the alleged cover-up.

“So these are the three individuals we want to know a lot about,” Villanueva said about the slide, implying that the Vera and Huntsman had access to the investigation materials, including a video of the incident, he said “landed” in Tchekmedyian’s hands. “These three people have some important questions to answer.”

The Los Angeles Times released the following statement from executive editor Kevin Merida:

Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s attack on Alene Tchekmedyian’s First Amendment rights for doing newsworthy reporting on a video that showed a deputy kneeling on a handcuffed inmate’s head is outrageous. His attempt to criminalize news reporting goes against well-established constitutional law. We will vigorously defend Tchekmedyian’s and the Los Angeles Times’ rights in any proceeding or investigation brought by authorities.

Local news site KnockLA posted the footage of the incident:

The announcement was not an unprecedented move from Villanueva, whose time leading the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has been rife with accusations and revelations of disinformation campaigns, corruption, gangs within the department and association with far right organizations, previous harassment and “investigations” of perceived critics and potential political rivals, and extreme violence by sheriff’s deputies toward everyone from inmates to working reporters.

The post Los Angeles County Sheriff Announces Plans to ‘Investigate’ Journalist Over Articles appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, disinformation, news media, reporting, TruthOrFiction, Viruses

Paper: Sweden and the ‘Herd Immunity’ Response to COVID-19

An academic paper attempting to make sense of Sweden’s COVID-19 “herd immunity” policy describes a cavalcade of preventable horrors.

The article (which was published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications) was – in its own words – published as an attempt to make sense of Sweden’s policies in narrative form. “Sweden was well equipped to prevent the pandemic of COVID-19 from becoming serious,” it begins, pointing out that the seeds to disregard expert opinions were planted several years before:

In 2014, the Public Health Agency merged with the Institute for Infectious Disease Control; the first decision byo its new head (Johan Carlson) was to dismiss and move the authority’s six professors to Karolinska Institute. With this setup, the authority lacked expertise and could disregard scientific facts. The Swedish pandemic strategy seemed targeted towards “natural” herd-immunity and avoiding a societal shutdown. The Public Health Agency labelled advice from national scientists and international authorities as extreme positions, resulting in media and political bodies to accept their own policy instead.

That policy was so hands-off as to be meaningless. The government initially offered advice and guidelines, but enforced very little. Schools, bars, offices, restaurants — all remained open:

There has only been one official crisis management plan released during the period of the pandemic, relating to the planned handling and actions—which we obtained through Freedom of Information laws (although some parts have been censored).(2020g, 2020h, 2020e). This plan was issued by the Ministry of Justice in June 2020, updated in September 2020, and focused on the impact of the pandemic on society (2020g, 2020h). The key points included: not to spread fear and panic, to prevent social unrest, and to limit the impact on the industry/economy/hospitality sector. This plan does not include anything about healthcare, healthcare capacity or infection control measures (2020g, 2020h).

Soon, Sweden became a standout among countries, described as a miracle that proved all the hand-wringing that other countries were doing over curbing transmission to be completely wrong. The “herd immunity” model was working, declared politicians and headlines approvingly, and soon anti-vaccine and anti-masking activists all over the world were pointing to Sweden to show how wrong public health experts could be.

A December 2020 fact-check provided by Reuters shows the sorts of narratives that were quickly spun almost entirely out of whole cloth, using far-right disinformation purveyor Dennis Prager’s claims that lockdowns did not work as a case study and highlighting the extremely high rate of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden compared to its neighboring countries:

According to mortality analyses from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center (here), the case fatality rate in Sweden is 2.6% — higher than that of neighboring Finland (1.6%), Norway (0.9%) and Denmark (1.0%), as well as the United States (2.0%). As a country, Sweden has had 66.76 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to 7.23 in Finland, 6.28 in Norway, 14.59 in Denmark, and 82.72 in the United States.

Despite the early signs that “herd immunity” was not an attainable goal without significant mitigation strategies, Sweden continued its policy of downplaying the dangers of the pandemic to the public as much as possible. This predictably led to deep political polarization and loss of faith and trust in Sweden’s government by 2021:

The first time the authorities advised people to use face masks on public transport at peak time was in December.

Some blame Sweden’s failures and shortcomings on the enormous power entrusted to the Public Health Agency, which is part of Sweden’s “administration model”.

Agencies are in charge of making day-to-day decisions in the areas they are responsible for.

It is very likely that once the threat is over, this model will have to be dismantled and rebuilt.

The handing of the pandemic will inevitably leave Swedish society deeply scarred and divided, while its repercussions might be felt way beyond the next general elections in September 2022.

And then came the disinformation campaigns, which were — as in other countries — mixed liberally with xenophobia and racism, sprinkled with threats of violence, and served up to the public through official government channels:

The Public Health Agency and Ministry of Health and Social Affairs discouraged the use of face masks by the public and claimed face masks are ineffective, dangerous and spread fear (2020a, Vogel, 2020; Bjorklund and Ewing, 2020, 2021j). Although some healthcare institutions did implement mask-use on their own initiative, mask wearing was actively discouraged or “not allowed” (at least at some points during the pandemic) in healthcare settings, elderly homes, schools and other settings, even resulting in professionals being laid off and people being denied access (Lundquist, 2020; Orange, 2021; Nordwall and Bolin, 2021; Ågren, 2021; Vogel, 2020; Bjorklund and Ewing, 2020, 2021j).

Ageism, too, played a part in Sweden’s massive death toll. For example, the journal article described how the elderly were routinely denied what might otherwise have been lifesaving care, such as receiving morphine instead of oxygen.

Children, who were erroneously considered to not to be vulnerable to long-term effects from COVID-19 infections, were also very deliberately denied preventative care:

Schools and municipalities have alerted social services and parents who wanted to protect their children by keeping them at home were fined. Few or no infection control measures were taken in many schools, and face masks were often not allowed (Aschwanden, 2021; Höög and Adman, 2020).

[…]

The Public Health Agency denied or downgraded the fact that children could be infectious, develop severe disease, or drive the spread of the infection in the population; while their internal emails indicate their aim to use children to spread the infection in society (Lindblad et al., 2021, 2020–2021b; Höög and Adman, 2020; Vogel, 2021; Ludvigsson, 2020).

At the end of the day, Sweden saw an astronomical and fully preventable death toll, widespread destruction of community trust and loss of faith in national media and political systems, increasing social inequalities and socioeconomic stratification, and its actions even spawned several more examples of global conspiracy theories and magical thinking that caused ripple effects of preventable deaths and suffering, all over the world:

The Swedish strategy has not shown to be superior in any measurable aspect compared to the Nordic neighbours or internationally (Balmford et al., 2020, 2020k; Braithwaite et al., 2021; Bjorklund and Ewing, 2020). This Swedish laissez-faire strategy has had a large human cost for the Swedish society. However, relying on public responsibility seemed to have worked to some extent as a consequence of the Swedish high trust in authorities.

The Swedish strategy has also been at the base of the controversial Great Barrington Declaration (published October 4, 2020) aiming for natural herd-immunity by letting the infections spread in a “controlled way” in society (Kulldorff et al., 2020), with several of the initiators/defenders having strong ties to Sweden (2021e). This strategy is considered internationally as unscientific, unethical, and unfeasible (Aschwanden, 2020; Aschwanden, 2021; Khalife and VanGennep, 2021; Sridhar and Gurdasani, 2021). Consequently, we argue that the Swedish strategy and several of its supporters have undermined efforts to suppress the infection in other countries (Kulldorff et al., 2020; Mccurry, 2020; Giesecke, 2020; Vogel, 2020, Bjorklund and Ewing, 2020).

The architect of Sweden’s COVID-19 policy, Anders Tegnell, has resigned as of March 2022 — to join the World Health Organization as a “senior expert.”

The post Paper: Sweden and the ‘Herd Immunity’ Response to COVID-19 appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

apple, disinformation, Entertainment, Fact Checks, Health / Medical, Love, marriage, rings, Smart devices, smart rings, smartwatches, Technology, TruthOrFiction, valentine's day, viral content

‘Smart’ Engagement Rings?

On February 1 2022, as Valentine’s Day season got off to a roaring start, a story on the topic of romance and marriage appeared on social media and subsequently went viral:

The rumor appears to have been sparked by a Twitter account called “SaycheeseDGTL,” which appears to largely deal in American pop culture news. It consisted simply of a claim and an image that might or might not be related, and without any link or other citation.

What was apparently the original post in this case did not have a high share count, but it the rumor was picked up and discussed so much on social media platforms that it soon became a trending topic:

 

The story took on a life of its own across platforms, with various commenters professing their rage and disgust at the display of what appeared to be yet another major breach of privacy by a tech company — and some aggregator sites even presenting them as a net positive:

Tech giant, Apple Technologies is said to have been engaged in the development of smart rings just like they have done with the Apple Smart Watches that help an iPhone user to perform among others, things he can do with his phone.

According to reports, the introduction of these smart rings is intended to reduce lies in relationships since the watch will be able to record the travel or movement trajectory of a person and upon request reveal details of that movement any day.

Although a little bulkier than a wedding or engagement ring tends to be, it looks like the Apple Ring should be able to fit on one finger without becoming a burden.

Indeed, given the stories about tech companies invading privacy and violating public trust that have appeared with increasing regularity for several years, it is understandable that readers might find this believable. Further confusing the issue is the fact that smart rings do exist, and there are some that appear to be marketed directly to couples, such as the rings described in this 2016 Mashable story:

One of the dorkiest Apple Watch features is the ability to send your heartbeat to another Apple Watch user in real time.

Now a company called TheTouch has taken that dorktastic feature to a new level with the HB Ring, which essentially does the same thing.

The smart rings let two people send each other their heartbeats with a simple tap on the device’s exterior.

The fact that smart rings already exist and have in some form for some time, along with the emotional appeal and the proximity to Valentine’s Day, made the red flags easy to miss — for one thing, the story was simply a claim and and image with no link to any site for verification or validation purposes. For another, the rumor initially appeared on a random Twitter feed without any history of offering either credible analysis or news stories.

But while you can buy smart rings and perhaps conceivably use them to track a spouse (if you are into that sort of thing), there are no smart rings that are being sold specifically for that purpose. In fact, running a search for the story turned up its actual source under all the detritus, which was a “satire” article from 2016 hosted on a site called Faking News (fakingnews.firstpost.com). We were unable to access the actual site, but we did find an archived version of the article, which clarified that the story was intended to be read as tongue-in-cheek:

San Francisco: Apple is all set to replace diamond rings for ever. According to internet rumors, Apple will soon launch a smart engagement ring which will be as shiny and overpriced as the diamond rings. And yes, they will call it (we haven’t made this up) iDo. Apple’s engagement will compete against diamond rings as both the products are targeted towards the same consumer base – people buying expensive and classy stuff to increase their social status.

Apart from being blindingly shiny, iDo will also be over-stuffed with technology – a key advantage iDo will have over the diamond rings. Since the ring finger has direct connection with the heart, iDo can read heart signals and do amazing things with the information. The most revolutionizing tech feature is Moral Messenger. This feature has to be enabled on rings of both partners and it will message immoral deeds one ring owner to the other ring owner, thus preventing sure-to-fail marriages. You can’t get away by taking off the ring as that sends a warning message to the other person.

Another cool feature is Temper Teller. With this feature, your ring can tell you about mood of your partner by changing colors. E.g. red means your partner is angry. This feature sure can help you plan the evening better. My favorite feature is Dream Date. iDo identifies the important dates, remembers them, and reminds you of the anniversaries a week in advance. The reminder signal is blinking LED light and its frequency increases as the important date comes closer. In pro mode, it can also give you tiny electric shocks if you keep ignoring the reminders.

In case that still seems believable, the site features a disclaimer in tiny print at the very bottom of the page:

Disclaimer: Content of this website is a work of fiction. Readers are advised not to confuse the “news reports” of Faking News as being genuine and true.

While it is true that smart rings exist and can arguably be used to invade the privacy of others (much as smartwatches have been used to do), this story actually emerged from a past satire site and was stripped from its original source and circulated to take advantage of both the proximity to Valentine’s Day and the fact that it was old enough for many readers to forget that it was intended as a joke.

Unverified stories such as these, which consist of a photo and a claim without a link or citation, may be used by disreputable accounts to build followers and online clout. They can also be used to track the receptivity of specific rumors across social media platforms for future disinformation campaigns. In any case, whatever its reason for appearing, this story is Not True.

The post ‘Smart’ Engagement Rings? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, building resilience, disinformation, dog whistle politics, dog whistling, dogwhistles, Entertainment, Identifying Fake News, news media, propaganda, reporting, signaling, TruthOrFiction

How to Fight Disinformation — Part IV: Signaling and Dog Whistling

This is part of an ongoing series about how communities can fight back and protect themselves against weaponized disinformation.

The Trump administration may be just a memory, but the disinformation that paved its way and the lies that it launched are still very much in effect — and perhaps one of the most pernicious disinformation techniques that it used is the most difficult to describe.

That method utilizes coded messages and toxic insider humor to build a communications network that is not easy to for the uninitiated to interpret, but which can have a great effect on insiders:

In his Sept. 29 [2020] debate with Joe Biden, Trump remarked that, “Bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things,” thinly veiled code for right-wing anxieties that swing states will be tipped by left-wing voter fraud. Trump thus nudged his base with a collusive wink: “You and I know what’s really going on, and I’ve got your back.”

Then there are Trump’s dog whistles. These are provocations superficially not about race but deeply exciting for his racist supporters.

On the 2015 campaign trail, for instance, Trump mocked Mitt Romney for politically “choking” in competition with Obama by wrapping his hands around his own neck with his tongue out, saying, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!” This “imitation” of Romney was a thinly veiled, mocking allusion to Eric Garner’s last words during his death by choking at the hands of a police officer the year before.

Yet Trump often wiggles away from charges of racism, sexism and incitements to bigoted violence because he encodes many of his messages in the garb of plausible deniability.

But disinformation and deniability didn’t start with Donald Trump, although he was in a prime position to generate and exploit it after a lifetime in the media. It didn’t start with the people who helped him get into power, either. It is the culmination of years of effort, with specific tactics that have specific aims. Many of them are easy to spot, if not easy to counter, but some are exceptionally slippery cases.

Signaling and Dog Whistling are similar enough to one another that they can both be described here. Where most disinformation campaigns can circulate despite (and even benefit from) maximum uncritical coverage, such as rumors or incomplete narratives, the dog whistle and signaling techniques can only operate as long as they are both public and their underlying meaning is unknown. In other words, they are perpetuated when they are highly covered but their underlying meanings are not known.

That means this tactic is is tailor-made for Gaslighting techniques, which then can also be used as part of the general Firehosing and Distraction fray. It is very easy to make an investigator or a journalist question their own idea of reality this way, as can be demonstrated by the ubiquity and heat of the discussion around the repurposed “OK sign” as just one example, whose flaunters benefited from it already being established as a very common hand symbol with multiple meanings:

The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.

The internet tendency to infuse layers of meaning into a single idea, image, or phrase was called social steganography by researcher Danah Boyd at least as far back as 2011:

Steganography is an age-old tactic of hiding information in plain sight, driven by the notion of “security through obscurity.” Steganographic messages are sent through channels where no one is even aware that a message is hidden. For example, in the ancient Greek text “The Histories,” Demaratus hid a message in the wood beneath the wax of a wax tablet while Histiaeus tattooed a message on a slave’s head that was rendered invisible when his hair grew. In both cases, the message was easily accessible but required knowing that a message existed in the first place. Such techniques are also part of contemporary children’s play with toys like invisible ink pens. Steganography isn’t powerful because of strong encryption; it’s powerful because people don’t think to look for a hidden message. The meaning behind Carmen’s song lyrics post is, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

[…]

Plausible deniability is an important part of this strategy.

In 2013, BBC picked up on the communication method, observing that it seemed at that point to be a growing trend among adults as well as youths, especially in countries whose governments did not support freedom of speech:

Consider this in a world where you are a criminal if you are homosexual in Uganda, if you insult the monarch in Thailand, and if you say anything that Kim Jong-un’s regime disapproves of in North Korea. What else might cease to be “innocent” under future data-hungry governments?

That explains why a fine pedigree of social steganography already exists online. In China, which boasts perhaps the world’s most sophisticated system of internet surveillance and censorship, the state’s favourite euphemism for crushing dissent – hé xié, or “harmony” – has become a surreptitious rallying cry for rebellion, courtesy of homophonic word play. Because Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, a word’s meaning can change with the intonation of a single syllable. Thus a slightly altered pronunciation of “harmony” yields the phrase “river crab”, a fictional creature used as a satirical means of mocking censorship. River crab has lent its name to an online political cartoon, Hexie Farm, which was banned by the Chinese government in 2011 but has nonetheless helped initiate free speech and human-rights campaigns.

But what flew under the radar at that time was how that exact mechanism was being co-opted and exploited by those very same repressive governments, in order to hijack pro-democracy movements while at the same time signaling their intent to others. This is a very easy way to spread messages in plain sight through mass or social media while still holding tightly to plausible deniability — and skepticism that such tactics exist only allow them to flourish:

The problem, of course, is that there are white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Klansmen who have increasingly begun using the use of the symbol both to signal their presence to the like-minded, as well as to identify potentially sympathetic recruits among young trolling artists flashing it. To them, the configuration means WP, for “white power.”

This use of the signal preceded the 4chan hoax that made it go viral. A number of alt-right figures, notably white-nationalist guru Richard Spencer, published photographs of themselves using the symbol as early as 2016. Milo Yiannopoulos adopted the symbol on social media as early as 2015.

But by then, the alt-right had already long weaponized the trolling culture and its use of irony to create a hall of mirrors surrounding such “memes.” These can easily be found in other alt-right “ironic” constructs, such as the hoax religion of “Kek” (and its home country, Kekistan), or its adoption of Pepe the Frog as a mascot.

Another, similar tactic to steganography or signaling is arguably more toxic, because is exploited by those seeking or already in positions of influence and power. This version is often utilized by American public figures who are in the process of courting racists and misogynists courting racists and misogynists: They will say something that sounds, at most, like little more than an oddly constructed sentence to the uninitiated, but which holds an entirely different message for those receptive to such messaging. The dual meanings are reflected in the name of this tactic, which is generally called dog whistle politics, or simply dog whistling.

Vox published an explainer about the tactic back in 2016, including how to identify it, which can be difficult:

While many people might hear “international banks” quite literally, or maybe as an allusion to Clinton’s ties to foreign financial interests in general, anti-Semites hear something very different. After all, the supposed existence of a cabal of international Jewish bankers working to undermine US democracy is a recurring theme in American anti-Semitism, from Henry Ford’s The International Jew to Reddit troll-conventions. Trump’s choice of language serves as a signal that he is one of them.

Or at least, that’s what many commentators have alleged. The problem is that it’s hard to establish whether a piece of speech or writing is a dog whistle. Indeed, it’s not obvious what evidence could, in principle, settle a dispute over whether some expression is or isn’t one. They are, by their nature, sneaky things.

Every now and again, a politician might, in a moment of candor, fess up. (David Kuo, a White House staffer under George W. Bush, reports — referring to speeches by Bush — that “we threw in a few obscure turns of phrase known clearly to any evangelical, yet unlikely to be noticed by anyone else.” Lee Atwater’s infamous remarks on how to imply the n-word without saying it also come to mind: “You say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights…”)

But accusations of dog whistling are generally met with exasperated denials.

Again, the greatest strength of signaling and dog whistling in this sense lies in the ability to be heard by many but only recognized by some; it can only exist in a political and mass media disinformation landscape already characterized by firehosing and ferocious gaslighting and distraction, as described in political terms as “multivocal appeals” in a 2014 paper by political psychologist Bethany Albertson:

The political effectiveness of these appeals has normative implications. It clearly troubles some political commentators and even a former Bush Administration official. Regarding their use of religious dog whistles, Kuo writes, ‘‘This should have been driving me nuts. It should have offended me far more than anything President Clinton or the Democrats were doing. We were bastardizing God’s word for our own political agenda and feeling good about it’’ (p. 61).

While a thorough normative evaluation of these appeals is beyond the scope of this article, several factors complicate the issue. First, in a country with this cultural pluralism, some multivocal communication of this sort is inevitable. A diverse population cannot be expected to understand everyone’s references, and speakers cannot always anticipate which references will go over the heads of their audience.

Also, speaking to a group in language that resonates with them is strategic but it might also be genuine. Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, responded to criticism for religious dog whistles by saying: ‘‘They’re not code words; they’re our culture,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s not a code word when I put a reference to T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ in our Whitehall speech [in London on Nov. 19, 2003]; it’s a literary reference. Just because some people don’t get it doesn’t mean it’s a plot or a secret’’ (quoted in Cooperman 2004, p 6).

In 2020, Albertson clarified that she did not think the term “dog whistle politics” applied to Donald Trump’s presidency — in fact, she discouraged media from watering down coverage of his rhetoric by describing it as a mere whistle:

As language and culture change over time, dog whistles evolve, too.

In the 1980s and 1990s concepts like “law and order” and “inner city” – phrases well used by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush – might have functioned as political dog whistles. Appealing to white suburbanites’ perception of cities as crime-ridden places overrun with Black and Latino people, they therefore signaled their intent to use the law against people of color to protect white people. Plausibly, 30 years ago, the racial meaning of the phrases might have evaded other listeners.

Today news coverage shows that Americans broadly understand the racial connotations when Donald Trump talks about “restoring law and order” and protecting “the suburbs.” Such phrases are no longer dog whistles, though they are still referred to as such.

Incorrectly characterizing Trump’s racist rhetoric – like calling lies “alternative facts” – obscures the serious problems in this administration’s politics. It suggests that most Trump supporters are missing his appeals to white fear and resentment, not ignoring or endorsing them.

Multilayered meanings exist throughout communications systems everywhere to a certain extent, and there will always be some friction in communication between the arbitrariness and the sign; furthermore, some developments are not inherently threats to societies at large, such as teens coding messages to one another on Facebook so that their parents won’t get involved in their social media.

That is not to say that the weaponized version of this, as with all disinformation tactics, cannot or should not be fought. It is disinformation, and therefore can and should be met with counterdisinformation tactics.

But how? In this case, as with just about every disinformation scenario, simple contradiction or debunking will not suffice. Arguing with those doing so does nothing to persuade viewers or listeners and wastes the time of those pushing back — and it also often provides gleeful fodder, if not actual recruitment material, for the purveyors behind the lies. Adopting their tactics only makes the situation murkier.

In this case, you have to remove the plausible deniability. That means that the best tactic is not just debunking or any other tactic by itself, but strong, clear, and relentless coordinated anti-bigotry and anti-disinformation countermessaging by members of the media, politicians, and by the public at large.

Berkeley law professor Ian Haney López, author of Dog Whistle Politics, says the only way to effectively fight divisive messaging in general is not just by debunking lies and hoping that truth wins out over emotion — and which is an important but incomplete part of the process of fighting corrosive lies — but also by further pushing out fact-based, positive messaging explaining what’s being done, and why:

Years ago, Haney López was studying the mass incarceration of people of color, trying to understand the underlying racism. But he came to the startling conclusion that voter racism wasn’t the main problem. The problem was that political leaders and media organs were promoting dog whistle messages in order to trigger their fears and shape their reactions toward liberal government.

[…]

Again, though, the researchers found it was possible to reverse those attitudes with a positive message that points to racist manipulation by the superrich and their allies and advocates inclusive coalitions of people who struggle with economic insecurity.

“The right has been winning by activating people’s racist ideas,” he said. “But the vast majority of those same people also hold anti-racist ideals, and those, too, can be activated. The challenge for us as progressives is to show people that their racially egalitarian ideals are a pragmatic way for them to improve conditions for all families, including their own.”

To be sure, the formula isn’t perfect. According to the research, Haney López said, about 20% of people are “unreachable” — hard-right reactionaries, white nationalists, even some elected officials. Still, he added, the research leads to a clear conclusion: “The most potent message right now is the message of a class-conscious, cross-racial solidarity.”

That makes defeating signaling and dog whistling (as with defeating all disinformation campaign tactics) simple, if not easy. Given that these corrosive actions prey entirely on existing social problems such as racism and inequality, it is the best and may be the only effective way fight them — by demanding of leaders and public figures that global societies are characterized by egalitarianism, anti-corruption, transparency, and honest messaging in the name of global security, and by refusing to settle for anything less.

The post How to Fight Disinformation — Part IV: Signaling and Dog Whistling appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, black lives matter, disinformation, Jacob Blake, Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, news media, reporting, TruthOrFiction, wisconsin

Kenosha Homicide Trial Riddled With Disinformation, Weaponized Narratives

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two people and wounded a third during a shooting spree in Kenosha, Wisconsin during protests against police brutality in August 2020, has made daily headlines nationally and internationally — and many of those are being driven by disinformation campaigns pushed by the far right in what appears to be an ongoing attempt to (among other things) muddy public perception of the trial.

One such story — pushed by fanfiction writer turned disinformation purveyor and activist Jack Posobiec — held that he had been personally told by a United States Marshal that jurors were holding up the case because they are afraid they will receive some sort of backlash:

They’re “worried about media leaking their names, what will happen to their families, jobs, etc.” he added in subsequent tweets, “including doxxing [sic] threats from ‘anarchist groups.’”

Numerous people pointed out that jury deliberations are secret and jurors are prohibited from discussing the case with anyone outside the jury pool. Also the case is in state court, not federal, so it’s not clear how a U.S. Marshal would be privy to such information.

Posobiec, an established propagandist who is perhaps best known for his public embrace of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon, did not explain how or why this purported U.S. Marshal would be feeding him such potentially explosive information.

This sparked calls by conservative activists for a mistrial, which only intensified after a flap over drone footage that ended up with Rittenhouse’s lawyers asking for just that:

A key piece of evidence in the prosecution’s case – a drone video that shows Rittenhouse fatally shooting the first man he fired aton the night of Aug. 25, 2020 – was called into question Wednesday when Rittenhouse’s defense lawyers said they received a lower quality version of the clip.

The mistrial request was the latest turn in a dramatic trial that has lasted over a week and features dozens of witnesses and videos. Rittenhouse and his lawyers say he was defending himself, while the state says the then 17-year-old was looking for a fight he provoked when he brought his AR-15 style rifle downtown, creating an active shooter situation.

Judge Bruce Schroeder, who has drawn both sharp criticism and high praise over how he has handled the case, has yet to rule on the mistrial motion. He also has not ruled on a separate defense motion for a mistrial with prejudice, meaning Rittenhouse could not be retried.

The issue with the footage appears to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding about how mobile phones work, as well as some other creative maneuverings by defense attorneys:

Rittenhouse’s lawyers say they only received a copy of the drone video on November 5th, after the trial started, and that instead of the 11.2MB video possessed by the state, the file they received was just 3.6MB. “What that means is the video provided to the defense was not as clear as the video kept by the state,” the motion for mistrial claims.

[…]

The iPhone’s Mail app automatically compresses video files sent as an attachment, and the defense attorney describes getting a renamed .mov file in a format that sounds exactly like an Apple Mail-app compressed video from an iPhone user. The defense was ultimately able to retrieve the full-resolution video file after sending an attorney to collect it on a USB stick.

Wisconsin defense attorney Jessa Nicholson Goetz tells The Verge that “it is not normal that video or other electronic evidence is AirDropped to defense counsel in the middle of a trial. That is highly atypical.”

As the jury continued deliberating, a new disinformation campaign took shape, this one around a freelance NBC producer who was cited for traffic violations by local police:

Disinformation purveyors immediately accused the network of sending the producer to take photographs of the jurors, which in turn was used to play into the pre-existing weaponized narrative that the mainstream media was “doxxing” them:

Jurors are ferried to and from the courthouse each day in a bus Schroder described as “sealed” to prevent them from seeing signs, protesters or anything from either side of the contentious trial that might influence them as they deliberate the fate of 18-year-old Rittenhouse.

A spokesperson for NBC News, the sister network of MSNBC, identified the individual as a freelancer in a statement to The Washington Post but denied an intent to make contact with jurors.

“Last night, a freelancer received a traffic citation. While the traffic violation took place near the jury van, the freelancer never contacted or intended to contact the jurors during deliberations, and never photographed or intended to photograph them,” the network spokesperson said. “We regret the incident and will fully cooperate with the authorities on any investigation.”

Schroeder has been critical of the some of the media coverage of the trial and said no one with the network would be allowed in the courthouse for the duration of deliberations….

The judge banned MSNBC from the courtroom for the duration of the deliberations as a result of the accusations.

Each of these rumors and stories — along with various other conspiracy theories — touch on ongoing themes in the weaponized narratives that have coalesced around this trial, such as distrust of mainstream media, explicit denials that racism in the United States exist, demonization of anti-fascist protesters, and various other, more wild-eyed disinformation campaigns.

Rittenhouse faces several felony charges for shooting three people, killing two of them, during a protest against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020 after law enforcement’s extrajudicial shooting of Jacob Blake, who is still recovering from his injuries.

Rittenhouse been charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, and attempted first-degree intentional homicide and faces a mandatory life sentence if convicted of the most serious charge. Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty for reasons of self defense.

The post Kenosha Homicide Trial Riddled With Disinformation, Weaponized Narratives appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

climate change, disinformation, Environment, reporting, TruthOrFiction

Despite Pledges, Hearings, Facebook Still Disseminating Climate Disinformation

Several weeks of highly damaging stories and one name change later, the company currently trying to rebrand as “Meta” is deploying the same shopworn tactics of denial and misdirection.

Facebook has said it is taking major action on disinformation campaigns, but analyses published as the COP26 global climate summit convened in Glasgow paint a very different picture.

One such report concluded that not only has the social media platform done nothing to prevent new weaponized narratives from forming, it is still allowing the worst offenders to operate unhindered on its platform, per a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The “Toxic Ten” analysis  — one in a series identifying the most prolific and disreputable purveyors of weaponized lies and narratives — points out that (as with other highly politicized topics) more than two-thirds of the disinformation, which is then spread to billions of Facebook accounts without moderation, originates from just ten accounts, which it deems “superpolluters”:

1) Breitbart, the disinformation site once run by Steve Bannon
2 Western Journal, whose founder claimed President Obama is Muslim
3) Newsmax, a key promoter of election fraud conspiracies
4) Townhall Media, founded by the Exxon-funded Heritage Foundation
5) Media Research Center, a “think tank” that received funding from Exxon
6) The Washington Times, founded by self-proclaimed messiah Sun Myung Moon
7) The Federalist Papers, a site that has promoted Covid misinformation
8 Daily Wire, one of the most engaged-with publishers on Facebook
9) Russian state media, pushing disinformation via RT.com and Sputnik News
10) Patriot Post, a secretive conservative site whose writers use pseudonyms

Collectively, these ten disinformation purveyors have a total of 186 million followers on social media platforms, and per the report they account for fully 69 percent of interactions on Facebook posts denying the reality of a catastrophically changing climate.

Despite the prevalence of such content and Facebook’s purported commitment to fighting corrosive climate disinformation, however, the report said that 92 percent of popular climate change denial articles did not receive an information label clarifying context or facts, and none of them at all received fact-checking labels. (For reference, Facebook has deemed our site “clickbait” and limited our visibility on the platform for years.)

Another, similar report was also released in the days leading up to the COP26 climate summit from environmental nonprofit Stop the Heat and watchdog group The Real Facebook Oversight Board. Its conclusions echo those of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s analysis:

The study analyzed 195 pages known to distribute misinformation about the climate crisis using Facebook’s analytics tool, CrowdTangle. Of those, 41 were considered “single issue” groups. With names like “Climate Change is Natural”, “Climate Change is Crap” and “Climate Realism”, these groups primarily shared memes denying climate change exists and deriding politicians attempting to address it through legislation.

Those that were not “single issue” groups included pages from figures like the rightwing politician Marjorie Taylor Greene, which posted misleading articles and disinformation about the climate crisis.

This “rampant” spread of climate misinformation is getting substantially worse, said Sean Buchan, the research and partnerships manager for Stop Funding Heat. Interactions per post in its dataset have increased 76.7% in the past year, the report found.

These reports also came as the fossil fuel industry is finally receiving scrutiny for its decades of nearly relentless disinformation campaigns against the American public that have effectively halted any meaningful progress toward climate change mitigation:

The U.S. has contributed more heat-trapping pollution than any country over time and has been the prime driver of global climate change. The national debate about how to address the problem has raged for decades, but progress toward a solution has been slow. Whenever presidents or Congress have introduced measures to slash emissions to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, they’ve been repeatedly derailed.

Most of those efforts involved outright denial that fossil fuel’s effects were harmful, gaslighting, smearing and threatening journalists, “greenwashing,” and attempts to distract the public from the realities around a warming planet:

In 1997, the Senate unanimously adopted a resolution opposing the first international treaty to cut greenhouse gases. A sweeping 2009 bill to reduce emissions never came to a vote in the Senate because it did not have enough support and was doomed to fail. In 2017, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord, the only country to reject the agreement.

The same headwinds have stopped nearly every effort, including Biden’s, to make systemic cuts to emissions: a powerful fossil fuel lobby that has spent vast sums of money to influence lawmakers while simultaneously sowing public doubt about the science of climate change.The same headwinds have stopped nearly every effort, including Biden’s, to make systemic cuts to emissions: a powerful fossil fuel lobby that has spent vast sums of money to influence lawmakers while simultaneously sowing public doubt about the science of climate change.

Climate change and hybrid warfare (of which disinformation campaigns are a major part) are linked and interrelated in myriad ways, as toxic narratives can weaponize all the ills that a changing climate deliver, from fires, to floods, to global pandemics against vulnerable populations in a highly targeted way thanks to social media’s gathering of personality data and personalized algorithms. This turns climate change into not just an issue of environmentalism or economics; as the United Nations has stated, it means that a warming planet is also a global security crisis, and one not easily resolved:

Recent scientific evidence has reinforced, and in some cases exceeded, our worst fears about the physical impacts facing us. It has become increasingly clear that climate change has consequences that reach the very heart of the security agenda: flooding, disease and famine, resulting in migration on an unprecedented scale in areas of already high tension; drought and crop-failure, leading to intensified competition for food, water and energy in regions where resources are already stretched to the limit; and economic disruption on the scale predicted in the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, and not seen since the end of the Second World War.

This is not about narrow national security, but about collective security in a fragile and increasingly interdependent world. And tragically, once again, it will be the most vulnerable and the least able to cope who will be hit first. There is no choice between a stable climate and the fight against poverty — without the first, the second will certainly fail.

The solution to the entwined threats lies in the same concept of “resilience,” which in both cases refers to how quickly a complex system can respond and return to its baseline after a disruption or an attack. The methods may look difference in practice (and will even differ by region) but the underlying concepts are the same — in order to build resilient systems, the world first has to ensure that rampant socioeconomic inequality and austerity are a thing of the past, as populism and polarization inevitably follow on their heels, which in turn feed into a media environment rife with disinformation:

In polarised political environments, citizens are confronted with different deviating representations of reality and therefore it becomes increasingly difficult for them to distinguish between false and correct information. Thus, societal polarisation is likely to decrease resilience to online disinformation. Moreover, research has shown that both populism and partisan disinformation share a binary Manichaean worldview, comprising anti-elitism, mistrust of expert knowledge and a belief in conspiracy theories. As a consequence of these combined influences, citizens can obtain inaccurate perceptions of reality. Thus, in environments with high levels of populist communication, online users are exposed to more disinformation.

Another condition that has been linked to resilience to online disinformation in previous research is trust in news media. Previous research has shown that in environments in which distrust in news media is higher, people are less likely to be exposed to a variety of sources of political information and to critically evaluate those. In this vein, the level of knowledge that people gain is likely to play an important role when confronted with online disinformation. Research has shown that in countries with wide-reaching public service media, citizens’ knowledge about public affairs is higher compared to countries with marginalised public service media. Therefore, it can be assumed that environments with weak public broadcasting services (PBS) are less resilient to online disinformation.

There is even a phrase linked to hybrid threats that describes efforts to interfere with recovery or mitigation: “resilience targeting.”  This emerging body of research describes the relationship between disasters and the ability to recover from them as yet another opportunity to destabilize regions by leveraging climate change-related disasters:

In conducting assessments of post-conflict regions and reconstruction, a pattern emerged that suggested many actions taken during a conflict were designed not to target military units, or even civilians directly, but were intended to prevent communities from being able to recover from the conflict. By attacking or blocking access to critical nodes in essential systems, aggressors could exploit key vulnerabilities and actively target those factors that constituted resilience and the ability of systems to recover following a conflict. The specific tactics could vary, from sowing landmines in agricultural areas, destroying environmental or health infrastructure (for example, wastewater treatment facilities), or undercutting livelihoods, this practice of resilience targeting often occurred in civil wars and was tied to policies of ethnic cleansing.

Similar tactics are observed in hybrid warfare environments. Hybrid warfare strategies are often employed in asymmetric conflicts, where the less powerful actor takes advantage of the adversary’s vulnerabilities to create instability and disruption. As resilience is a key component of vulnerability, actively undercutting resilience of critical systems automatically increases associated vulnerabilities, whether the ability to withstand outside attacks, maintain political, social, and economic stability, or to recover following a disaster….

To put it in simpler terms, the best way to combat the disastrous effects of a quickly warming planet is to emphasize fairness, honesty, and egalitarianism across the board, and by fighting the effects of increasing socioeconomic inequality on a cultural and political level on a global level. It requires redefining the concept of “security” in human rather than geopolitical terms, fighting for transparency from elected officials, and pressuring lawmakers and corporations for better policies.

The first step toward building resilience to climate change and weaponized disinformation  campaigns is a commitment from social media platforms to live up to their promises to fight disinformation campaigns on every level, as to do anything less is to profoundly threaten global security. The first step to combating this worldwide problem is demanding that Facebook moderate disinformation campaigns on its platform — as it has repeatedly promised to do.

The post Despite Pledges, Hearings, Facebook Still Disseminating Climate Disinformation appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

disinformation, distraction, firehosing, gaslighting, propaganda, resilience, TruthOrFiction

How to Fight Disinformation — Part III: Distraction

On September 20 2021, shocking photographs and accompanying video made the rounds on news networks and social media appearing to show border agents on horseback whipping asylum-seekers on foot as they ran in terror:

A mounted U.S. Border Patrol agent shouted commands in a tense encounter with Haitian migrants wading through the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas.

As the Haitians tried to climb onto the U.S. side of the river Sunday afternoon, the agent shouted: “Let’s go! Get out now! Back to Mexico!”

The agent menacingly swung his reins like a whip, charging his horse toward the men in the river who were trying to return to an encampment under the international bridge in Del Rio after buying food and water in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.

One migrant fell as he tried to dodge, others shielded their heads with their hands.

After a few minutes the agents retreated, allowing the migrants to return to the camp, where over 10,000 are waiting for the chance to open an asylum claim in the United States.

It took nearly no time at all for the distraction and derailing attempts to begin. The pattern, as with all weaponized narratives, becomes easier to see if you look for the mechanisms behind the topics. The attempt to derail or distract is especially clear those around mass shootings, when aggrieved gun enthusiasts complain en masse that journalists reporting on hideous death and destruction perhaps misreported a minor detail around the gun manufacturer, using the structure of a fact-check in some cases to boot.

In this case, it manifested in a weaponized discussion over one point: whether border agents were abusing asylum-seekers by whipping them with long reins, rather than using actual whips (quickly followed by an announcement by the Biden adminstration that horses patrols would no longer be used at that particular crossing):

This is a Distraction attempt, and it works, as the name indicates, to distract the public from information that is too big or shocking to conceal. It is a highly effective way to get people who are rightfully enraged over horrors to expend their energies that might be used to bring about lasting change on arguments over details that are either unimportant or completely unrelated.

It is probably one of the least clever and most effective ways to push a narrative — by simply changing the topic of the discussion with emotional pleas, heartrending or frightening imagery, or in its lowest-effort version, focusing on minor details of a story with heavy emotions attached to it. This sucks up time, energy, and space in the discussion, and can re-route the outrage sparked by an event or a report into online quagmires of arguments, with no clear end or resolution, all by design. 

While this may seem like an overly simplistic and not very effective way to change a narrative, it is actually easy, cheap, difficult to pin down, and had a lot of utility for disinformation purveyors to take up space that might otherwise be occupied by thoughtful, nuanced discussion — the case even before the technique was further weaponized by social media algorithms and personality targeting.  

It is a huge field, possibilities are endless, and disinformation purveyors are reflexive and opportunistic, which makes it impossible to predict what exactly will be used to distract the public. The Center for Media and Democracy’s site Sourcewatch.org mentions several different distraction subgroups for their specific example, which was the disinformation and propaganda around the U.S.-led war in Iraq in 2003: Nationalism, straw man, scapegoat, phenomenon, broadening the issue, marginalization, demonization of the opposition, and “Googlewashing,” a term which we feel can be replaced by simply “firehosing.”

As social scientist Herbert Simon said during a talk he gave on the new information economy all the way back in 1971, human attention has its limits, despite how well we may feel we can multitask; that means that in more information-rich environments, such as the world of 2021, we have to adjust our systems — personal, social, cultural — to accomodate: 

Information processing is at the heart of executive activity, indeed at the heart of all social interaction. More and more we are finding occasion to use terms like “information,” “thinking,” “memory,” and “decision making” with twentieth-century scientific precision. The language of the scientific culture occupies more and more of the domain previously reserved to the common culture.

Make no mistake about the significance of this change in language. It is a change in thought and concepts. It is a change of the most fundamental kind in man’s thinking about his own processes about himself.

[…]

…[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attentionand a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Derailing is a more extreme version intended to jolt the targeted narrative out of the regional or global discussion in order to change the topic or blunt or mute the emotional heft a specific story might carry. It generally requires heavy doses of shocking optics or stories and an engaged media corps.

Derailing can be more difficult to get going, but when it works it can potentially sweep the entire discussion clean of the previous topic. This can sometimes happen organically, such as when there is an unanticipated major disaster or an unexpected mass casualty event, but in a media ecosystem riddled with weaponized disinformation campaigns, it becomes a strategy. (A good recent example of the effectiveness of such a tactic might be the week the entire world’s social media platforms spent talking about Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s testicles, which culminated in a legitimate international incident in which Trinidad and Tobago’s health minister was forced to publicly deny that any such incident was reported.)

Finally, Distraction has a secondary effect similar to Firehosing, in that it can be used to affect the ability of people to know what is and is not true: 

How to Fight Disinformation — Part I: Firehosing

A simple system from  Graphika lead and disinformation specialist Ben Nimmo also touches on the concept of “distraction” as part of what he calls “Disinformation’s Four Ds,” or known techniques employed by botnets or disinformation purveyor trolls:

Dismiss
Dismiss is the first and is by far the most common technique for a threat actor to deploy. The threat actor will say “don’t listen to them because” and then throw out an insult about the source. The attempt is to silence the entity speaking out and insult them to sew distrust in the source.

Distort
Distort is an easy concept to understand. If a person sees that the fact doesn’t suit their preferred story, they will make up their own facts to retell the narrative.

Distract
If a conversation is uncomfortable or unfavorable, then someone can attempt to change the subject. A person can do that by starting a conversation about something else. Another method is to accuse the accuser of being guilty of the same thing. This technique can draw a false comparison between the critic and the one being criticized while also changing the subject.

Dismay
Dismay means to try and scare people off. This technique is often used when there is a policy debate. Using dismaying rhetoric can warn against dire consequences of an action hoping they will not pursue their line of inquiry or achieve a previously stated goal.

Forewarning is the best defense against all of these techniques. As in every aspect of disinformation campaigns, knowing that attacks can take this form is one of the most helpful ways of inoculating against them.

You may want to argue with people being loudly and smugly wrong online. There is a definite utility to such arguments. In the case of a major distraction or derailing attempt, however, remember that the main goal is to exhaust you and that you are not arguing with somebody who is acting in good faith. Instead, refuse to engage with that aspect of the discussion and stay on the actual topic. Remember, the more you type, the information you give social media platforms which they can then use to influence or manipulate your worldview. Parlay the emotions evoked by reports or events into real-world actions — public pressure or protests, for example — instead of online arguments, and stick with people you know to be credible and who have some degree of demonstrated expertise in the subject matter being discussed (particularly when it is a topic as prone to disinformation attacks as border and immigration.)  Spectacle can interfere with memories of events, but spectacle quickly falls away — whereas reality tends to have staying power.

The post How to Fight Disinformation — Part III: Distraction appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

archaeology, archaeology memes, Fact Checks, Food / Drink, historical digs, History, italy, mcdonald's, roman roads, romans, TruthOrFiction, viral content

McDonald’s and the Roman Road

In late August 2021, the following post about a McDonald’s restaurant incorporating an archaeological discovery into its floor appeared on the Reddit sub r/interestingasfuck and r/damnthatsinteresting:

A Roman Road was discovered while excavating for a new McDonalds in Marino, Italy. They incorporated a glass floor in the restaurant after excavations were complete from interestingasfuck

According to the post, the fast food corporation was excavating to prepare to lay the foundation for a new building in Marino, Italy when they discovered the remains of a road from Roman times, complete (as can be seen in the accompanying image) with skeletons. No further information about the purported restaurant was immediately obvious in the post.

A Facebook post offered up a similarly tantalizing blurb, again without citation:


It said:

A Roman Road was discovered while excavating for a new McDonalds in Marino, Italy. They incorporated a glass floor in the restaurant after excavations were complete

While neither of these posts were dated and it is not entirely clear why this came up again in August 2021, it is true. Stories of the discovery were first reported in 2017,  often accompanied by the same or similar images from various angles:

The newly opened [as of 2017] result is the only McDonalds on Earth that includes an ancient Roman artifact. It all started in 2014, Povoledo reports, when workers in Marino came across a 147-foot-long stretch of road dating between the first and second centuries B.C.E. The road would otherwise have been documented and reburied, Povelodo notes. Instead, McDonalds sponsored an archaeological dig and used the road as part of the restaurant.

The displayed skeletons were re-created out of resin cast from three bodies were found buried in the ancient site.

It is not uncommon to find sites of archaeological interest in places that are now considered unremarkable or jejune. In England, for example, the long-lost bones of King Richard III, who was killed in battle in 1485, were found beneath a parking lot in 2012:

In August 2012, an excavation began in a city council car park – the only open space remaining in the likely area – which quickly identified buildings connected to the church.

The bones were found in the first days of the dig and were eventually excavated under forensic conditions.

Details of the reburial ceremony have yet to be released, but Philippa Langley from the Richard III Society said plans for a tomb were well advanced.

The Rosetta Stone was discovered by French soldiers in July 1799 while they were digging to enlarge a fort during Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt:

Although accounts of the Stone’s discovery in July 1799 are now rather vague, the story most generally accepted is that it was found by accident by soldiers in Napoleon’s army. They discovered the Rosetta Stone on 15 July 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It had apparently been built into a very old wall. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard (1771–1822), realised the importance of the discovery.

On Napoleon’s defeat, the stone became the property of the British under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had found. The stone was shipped to England and arrived in Portsmouth in February 1802.

The McDonald’s restaurant appears to be the first to incorporate the ruins into its business, however. The corporation does promise to keep the two sites separate:

While the integration of the chain and the archaeological site could have easily resulted in a gimmicky dining spot, the corporation has worked carefully to display the road as any other preserved ancient site: There’s no McDonald’s branding in the gallery, which is also accessible from the outside; you don’t need to set foot in the restaurant to reach it.

“We’ve been able to return a stretch of Roman road to the local community and to the whole of Italy,” Mario Federico, the head of McDonald’s Italia, told the Telegraph. “The project is a good example of how the public and private sectors can collaborate effectively on reclaiming cultural heritage.”

As of 2021, the dig site with a restaurant attached (or the restaurant with an archaeological site attached) remains open to the public.

The post McDonald’s and the Roman Road appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, anti-masking, anti-vaxxers, disinformation, Entertainment, Identifying Fake News, inauthentic activity, inauthentic behavior, news media, reporting, social media, trump, TruthOrFiction, War

Anatomy of an Inauthentically Organized Campaign

In mid-2021, as the Delta variant rapidly spread among unvaccinated populations across the United States and public officials began publicly flirting with the prospect of still more measures to quell the spread of the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, local and national news organizations began to turn their attention to violent, emotionally charged spectacles played out by people claiming to be opposed to mask mandates.

In one such event on July 22 2021, anti-masking activists mocked and attacked a breast cancer patient outside a Los Angeles clinic:

Protesters then ask [cancer patient Kate Burns] if she’s familiar with the Civil Rights Act. “Get on the right side of history,” one man says. “You’ve got a lot of anger you need to release. It’s a very dangerous emotion.”

Tensions continued to rise as more far-right, anti-maskers arrived on the scene. A small group of anti-fascists also arrived, and got into altercations with the far-right. A woman holding a megaphone shoved Burns, and then punched her several times. Burns said, on social media, that the woman hit her in the chest and struck her scars.

[…]

Thursday was the second time that anti-maskers had targeted that particular breast cancer clinic over its mask policy. The ugly scenes and casual political violence that unfolded there on both occasions have become troublingly common across the U.S….

Increasingly confrontational scenes in which apparently aggrieved people made loud scenes for reasons they do not seem to be able to fully articulate does indeed seem to be increasingly common.

But why? And how does such activity come to be? The short answer, by harnessing the power of organized phone calls, social media groups, disinformation, does not reveal much about the actual anatomy of such a campaign.

The longer answer is this: Political groups have created a modular form of activism that makes everything from signs to messaging interchangeable, simple, and downloadable. That is not new, nor is it very exciting. Organizing networks for messaging and protesting purposes is a very common practice.

But that common and relatively harmless practice is easily weaponized by disinformation campaigns. When modular activism meets existing right-wing disinformation networks, it becomes inauthentic by definition; bad faith political entities are now tapping in to the resentment and rage that they have deliberately incited and provoked in entire groups of like-minded conspiracy theorists in order to get them to show up at protests to make scenes. The topics and ideas behind them do not matter. What matters is the outrage.

To put it another way, the algorithm and propaganda networks that were first established for QAnon and other white supremacist and insurrectionist disinformation campaigns have now been turned over promoting and planning events to set up local and state power grabs.

Before the possible return of a mask mandate, many of these protests were around another issue its attendees seemed to be unable fully articulate, critical race theory (or maybe transgender rights, or vaccines):

Over time, it becomes obvious that the same groups of people have been showing up to stage these scenes, as can be witnessed with group of people in Los Angeles at Cedars-Sinai — the same group that attacked cancer patient Kate Burns — shouting invective against masks, vaccines, quarantines, “antifa,” and pedophiles, while waving “Recall Newsom” flags:

It is easy to spot authentic versus inauthentic protests.  Authentically organized protests, where the people showing up actually care about the topic they are demonstrating for or against as opposed to simply trying to upset people they disagree with politically, stay on message and while they can be emotional, they lack the quality of inarticulate, braying rage that is all too familiar to anyone who has covered an inauthentically organized event.

There are also visual cues and slogans that bear a more than passing resemblance to white supremacist, sovereign citizen, anti-vaxxer, or QAnon catchphrases by design:

A closer look at the “Save Our Students” rally (which, as mentioned, deliberately echoes the “Save Our Children” QAnon campaign) turns up some interesting conspiracy theory detritus characteristic of the career gadflies who populate inauthentically organized protests, such as the all-purpose sign behind the speaker in this image:

Multiple groups with their own political agendas are coordinating these campaigns for their own purposes. The far-right Heritage Foundation — which has pushed the anti-critical race theory disinformation campaign from its inauthentic beginning — has a website promoting “Heritage Action for America,” a rotating stable of campaigns that anyone can use for astroturfing, if they’re so inclined.

For example, their “issue toolkit” page on “critical race theory” (which has been engineered into a right-wing euphemism for any sort of curriculum delving into institutional racism in the United States) contains the following suggested “talking points. As with their various signs and slogans, these may sound familiar to anyone following the inauthentic moral panics and dramas unfolding in policy discussions and school board meetings:

  • True equality will be achieved by maximizing the ability of Americans to become self-sufficient, not by dividing Americans on the basis of race and apportioning resources based on skin color.

  • For Americans who care about poverty alleviation and constitutional government, critical race theory represents a critical threat. If implemented, critical race theory’s social policies would continue to erode the key preconditions for advancement—family, education, and work—and leave ostensibly “favored” groups more dependent on public subsidy and redistribution than ever.

  • Teachers should not use the goal of teaching “diversity of thought”as an excuse to teach students to view others through ethnic stereotypes, or that America is an irredeemably racist country.

The page, like most of the “action toolkit” entries, also contains directions on who to call, scripts for what to say, and social media posts for Heritage’s “Sentinels” to copy and paste on social media (it is easy to find multiple examples of this in practice by searching for any of the text in any of these campaigns on social media):

This can be done for any topic, effectively offering the illusion of popularity for policies or ideas that do not exist in reality, but this construct is augmented by real-world events staged by people who in actuality have little loyalty to the ideas they pretend to espouse, leading to messaging that is, to say the least, muddled and confusing (Heritage Action and its dozens of affiliated groups also offer similar toolkits for coronavirus legislation, the Equality Act, immigration, and many others, complete with scripts for phone calls and social media posts.)

However, the stunts and scripted phone calls and tweets seem to be enough to convince newsrooms and politicians that they are legitimate, and thus these events are being used to push changes across the United States. As of July 2021, very little coverage of the many, many events that have been planned or interrupted by this type of activity over the years notes its obvious inauthenticity, or the fact that it uses established disinformation networks to do. Nor do many reporters or pundits observe that this behavior spiked during the Trump administration and continues into the Biden administration, as the far right once again convulses to regain power.

The harm in this is, of course, is that it is disinformation as policy which deliberately elides the actual will of the people — a profoundly anti-democratic campaign. In other words, this is not a sign of emotions running high or an increasingly polarized country. It is a relatively small group of activists who explicitly intend to push deeply policies into reality that are deeply unpopular in at best and actively harmful at worst. They are intentionally being pushed by and for the far right in order to get white supremacists, anti-vaccine activists, and other conspiracy theorists into power at all levels — so that they can enact whatever agenda against Americans they like.

The post Anatomy of an Inauthentically Organized Campaign appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, anti-vaccine, anti-vaxxers, antivaxxers, biden administration, cpac, disinformation, doctor's plot, medical, newsmax, reporting, stalin, TruthOrFiction, tucker carlson

Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Campaign Echoes ‘Doctor’s Plot’ Rhetoric

An ongoing medical disinformation campaign took a sharp turn in July 2021, when right-wing commentators and politicians pivoted to direct attacks against continued efforts by the Biden administration to get more Americans vaccinated against COVID-19.

The disinformation started to reach new keening heights during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), whose QAnon-embracing ranks went out of their way to push conspiracy theories in order to politicize any measures taken to slow the spread of the pandemic, which has so far killed more than half a million Americans.

This routinely weaponized rhetoric to which conservative messaging has pivoted in near unison espouses long-discredited conspiracy theories about “depopulation” caused by the COVID-19 vaccine — while simultaneously justifying the mass deaths and suffering the virus has already caused (and betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution):

Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt cavalierly suggested on Friday night that vaccines are “against nature” because some diseases are just “supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people” since that’s just the “way evolution goes.”

In recent weeks, right-wing media has seamlessly shifted from casually pushing vaccine hesitancy on its viewers to outright advocating for vaccine resistance, culminating in a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas this weekend cheering at the fact that the federal government hasn’t met its vaccination goals.

Videos out of CPAC showed a persistent theme of vaccine denial messaging amid the rest of the corrosive disinformation pushed by the groypers, boogaloo bois, open white supremacists, and QAnon adherent who attended the event, which Dr. Anthony Fauci (who is widely recognized as the nation’s top infectious disease expert and who is now vilified by the CPAC crowd) said was deeply disturbing:

It’s horrifying. I mean, they are cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people not to try and save their lives…

I mean, if you just unpack that for a second… it’s almost frightening to say, ‘Hey, guess what, we don’t want you to do something to save your life. Yay!’ Everybody starts screaming and clapping. I just don’t get that…. And I don’t think that anybody who’s thinking clearly can get that.

The darkly speculative narratives of shadowy medical practitioners lying to the public so that they can do nonspecific (but always evil and frightening) things is reminiscent of the Soviet “Doctor’s Plot” of 1953, detailed here in a 2002 article in BMJ:

In general [Joseph] Stalin severely mistrusted doctors—whatever their nationality. In his memoirs Dmitri Shostakovich tells the tale of Vladimir Bekhterev, a world renowned psychiatrist who at 70 was summoned to assess Stalin’s mental condition.9 The good doctor described him as ill, perhaps even paranoid. And how right he was. Bekhterev died immediately afterwards—poisoned by Stalin.

But Stalin’s special hatred was reserved for Jewish doctors. Although in the last decades of Tsarist rule Jews were restricted from owning land and excluded from most other professions, they had indeed entered medicine in numbers far out of proportion to their small percentage in the overall population.6 So when Stalin decided to resolve the Soviet Union’s “Jewish problem,” it made perfect sense to open the campaign with a show trial against a group of (mainly Jewish) doctors who were often branded “Zionists” or agents of the “Joint” (an international Jewish charitable organisation).

A propaganda offensive accompanied the plans to deport—“for their own good”—the Jewish population. One million copies of a pamphlet were prepared for distribution—its title: “Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country.” The deportation was purportedly “in response” to a carefully orchestrated letter prepared for Pravda and signed by many terrified Soviet Jewish leaders, imploring “The Father of all the Peoples” to deport the Jews for their own protection. It appealed to “the government of the USSR, and to Comrade Stalin personally, to save the Jewish population from possible violence in the wake of the revelations about the doctor-poisoners . . . of Jewish origin . . . We, as leading figures among loyal Soviet Jewry, totally reject American and Zionist propaganda claiming that there is anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.”6

According to Stalin’s plan, the doctors would be convicted and scheduled to be hanged—symbolically—around Easter.

This antisemitic conspiracy theory naturally echoed a much older antisemitic conspiracy theory, because disinformation cannot take root in the absence of an underlying appeal to existing bigotry or blame directed toward an already marginalized group:

In accusing the Jewish doctors of being poisoners, Stalin was, of course, reviving a libel that was common among medieval anti-Semites. The most notorious incarnation of the “Jews as poisoners” libel occurred in the fourteenth century when they were accused of having caused the devastating Black Plague by poisoning the wells of Europe. In addition to all the Jews who died from the plague, thousands more were murdered in pogroms prompted by these accusations. In 1610, the University of Vienna’s medical faculty certified as its official position that Jewish law required doctors to kill one out of ten of their Christian patients. One wonders what it must have been like to be in a Jewish doctor’s office — in back of nine other patients.

Stalin died before he could carry out the acts he envisioned (and there is some debate over whether these plans were ever going to be implemented at all) but the corrosive disinformation and weaponized propaganda circulated did plenty of lasting damage on their own. They reverberated in everyday interactions and manifested in many cases as antisemitic moral panics:

Ongoing investigation not only confirm the re-launch of the anti-Semitic campaign between the end of 1952 and the beginning of 1953, but they also prove the existence of an organised plan for mobilising the population through Judophobia. The regime used the latter as an effective means of political pressure and social intimidation – and as an excuse to give new strength to the anti-religious struggle, so obtaining the closure of several synagogues and the confiscation of their properties. 43

The reports suggest that the authorities, though having actively instigated Judophobia, were remarkably anxious at the possibility of spontaneous manifestation of popular violence. Indeed the population gave proof of a high level of anti-Semitism, calling most often for the expulsion of the Jews from their positions, but also their execution or deportation to Siberia.44 In some cases, even Stalin’s death was ascribed to the Jews and somebody explained the liberation of the physicians by resorting to the alleged Jewishness of Lavrentii P. Beriia.45

The same situation occurred in Byelorussia where – by means of any possible media of communication – a major press campaign was orchestrated with the support of party propagandists in assemblies, in workplaces and particularly in schools of every kind and level. The campaign led to the almost complete expulsion of the Jews from any position of responsibility in the whole republic, with people calling for their dismissal, but also their internment and deportation.46

The anti-vaccine conspiracy theories in 2021 are not the same as those circulated around the Doctor’s Plot in 1953, but neither did they appear in a vacuum. Weaponized disinformation campaigns may not always be exactly the same narratives word for word, but like history, they do often rhyme, and by design.

Biden Admin HHS Secretary’s ‘Absolutely the Government’s Business’ Vaccine Remarks

In 2021, these anti-vaccine campaigns are being used to — among other things — expel public health officials from positions of responsibility for refusing to put politics or profit over regional responses to a vicious pandemic that is, as of July 2021, once again on the upswing after killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions more globally:

The Tennessee state government on Monday fired its top vaccination official, becoming the latest of about two dozen states to lose years of institutional knowledge about vaccines in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The termination comes as the virus shows new signs of spread in Tennessee, and the more-transmissible delta variant surfaces in greater numbers.

Dr. Michelle Fiscus, the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health, said she was fired on Monday afternoon and provided a copy of her termination letter. It provides no explanation for her termination.

Fiscus said she was a scapegoat who was terminated to appease state lawmakers angry about the department’s efforts to vaccinate teenagers against coronavirus. The agency has been dialing back efforts to vaccinate teenagers since June.

“It was my job to provide evidence-based education and vaccine access so that Tennesseans could protect themselves against COVID-19,” Fiscus said in a written statement. “I have now been terminated for doing exactly that.”

The state has now moved to end all vaccine programs for teenagers, not just COVID-19 vaccines without further explanation — amid heavy pressure from Republican lawmakers:

The health department will also stop all COVID-19 vaccine events on school property, despite holding at least one such event this month. The decisions to end vaccine outreach and school events come directly from Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey, the internal report states.

Additionally, the health department will take steps to ensure it no longer sends postcards or other notices reminding teenagers to get their second dose of the coronavirus vaccines. Postcards will still be sent to adults, but teens will be excluded from the mailing list so the postcards are not “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” the report states.

Meanwhile, the spread of vicious anti-vaccine propaganda can be traced back to just a few “influencers” on social media platforms — per a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, about two-thirds of all of disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on social media originates from just a dozen people.

The post Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Campaign Echoes ‘Doctor’s Plot’ Rhetoric appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

disinformation, Heritage Foundation, Identifying Fake News, inauthentic activity, inauthentic behavior, jjimjilbangs, koreatown, los angeles, manufactured outrage, marc t. little, reporting, social media, tanton network, Terrorism, TruthOrFiction, white boy summer

Wi Spa Weaponized Disinformation Campaign

In late June and early July 2021, far-right activists attempted to launch a new disinformation campaign in the wake of a viral video of a woman harassing staff at a traditional public bathhouse in an historic Los Angeles neighborhood

The video, which was taken at Wi Spa in Los Angeles’ famous Koreatown neighborhood, showed a woman (identified only as “CubanaAngel“) haranguing the spa staff about transgender clientele and claiming without proof that she saw “a penis” (and later in the video, “a dick”) on the women’s side of the spa:

Despite the lack of any proof whatsoever that anything like this ever happened, the video went viral as far-right activists did their best to inauthentically push the story into the mainstream discourse with escalating claims about “men” (transgender women) trying to get into the woman’s side of a Korean jjimjilbang — a traditional public bathhouse, much like a Russian banya or a Turkish hammam — in the historic Los Angeles, California neighborhood of Koreatown.

The stunt took place against a backdrop of similarly inauthentically organized disinformation campaigns and events supporting far right causes all over the country, such as the “critical race theory” flap that is an attempt to get QAnon-type candidates into school boards and other positions of power all over the country and which is also — like every other such campaign — characterized by videos of emotional claims without any proof, quickly followed by astroturfed “protests.”

A few days after that, on July 3 2021, openly white supremacist and eugenicist “protesters,” who have been organizing via “White Boy Summer”-themed Facebook groups and other established disinformation networks, showed up to harass spa employees, where they were met by anti-fascist counter-protesters:

Visuals from the ensuing brawl, during which at least one right-wing protester stabbed another right-wing protester, was quickly turned into a secondary propaganda campaign by the usual discredited purveyors:

A subsequent press advisory makes it extremely clear that the goal was to whip up controversy around transgender women in order to challenge and re-write California laws to remove existing protections for transgender people:

Despite the bloodied protests, CubanaAngel calls on anyone outraged by the unjust laws passed in the state of California that fail to protect women and girls in public spaces to join her. Our goal is to repeal the laws and to vote against legislators who do not believe the rights of women and little girls should be protected.

“California’s Civil Code, Section 51, is an unjust law masquerading as an anti-discrimination law that disregards grandmothers, mothers, wives and little girls,” CubanaAngel said. “This is not right. We are sacrificing the safety of women and children and I am not afraid to speak.”

The name listed on that press release as “CubanaAngel’s” spokesman, one Marc T. Little of CURE America Action, is a familiar one to anybody covering propaganda networks during the Trump administration. Little is a clergyman, an entertainment lawyer, and a right-wing activist who goes by “The Prodigal Republican.” Little is also a known political gadfly who ran for mayor of Inglewood, receiving a mere 18 percent of the vote, in 2018.

It should come as no surprise that Little has also written extensively about “critical race theory” (and invokes the antisemitic “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, a favorite of the alt-right, to do so), although his interpretation of what critical race theory actually entails is naturally also riddled with disinformation:

Cultural Marxism became critical of Western thought (“critical theory”) in the 1920s and expanded thinking to race, class and gender. As repackaged liberation theology from the 1960s, CRT is simply the culturally acceptable Trojan Horse for Marxism that redefines the social construct of “racism.” It is only about power; the theory and movement have nothing to do with race. (Incidentally, that focus on power and not race can also be said of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.)

Attempting to confront power structures, CRT divides America into two categories: oppressor and the oppressed. This is known as “Intersectionality” and was introduced by Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989. The oppressor is defined as White, male, heterosexual, cis gendered, (naturally born male), able-bodied and native born. The oppressed are ranked by degrees of “oppression.” If you are Black, you are oppressed. If you are Black and gay, you are more oppressed. If you are Black, gay and female, you have an even greater degree of oppression.  And so on.

A quick look at his website, TheProdigalRepublican.com, makes his affiliations clear:

The Heritage Foundation, the Council for National Policy, and their assorted networks have already been identified as one of the main drivers of the artificially mobilized anti-CRT campaign intended to get far right candidates onto school boards (and into other positions of power) all over the country, using — as mentioned — exactly the same tactics on display here: Viral videos heavy on the emotions and harassment but light on the proof, followed by instant attention and coverage from the far right disinformation purveyor networks, all pivoting in unison to push a narrative toward a specifically stated goal, using messaging and algorithms to create the illusion of consensus or popularity for actions or ideas where none truly exist (and bolstered by relentless “both-sides” reporting by mainstream news agencies, which are apparently incapable of separating aggressors from defenders):

“We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” [Heritage Foundation-affiliated right-wing activist Christopher] Rufo wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Rufo said in an interview that he understands why his opponents often point to this tweet, but said that the approach described is “so obvious.”

If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign,” he said. Rufo says his own role has been to translate research into programs about race into the political arena.

“I basically took that body of criticism, I paired it with breaking news stories that were shocking and explicit and horrifying, and made it political,” he said. “Turned it into a salient political issue with a clear villain.”

As if that wasn’t enough, Heritage’s news and opinion blog, The Daily Signal, published a post by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins (yet another far right disinformation purveyor) on July 7 2021, using the incident to attack the Biden administration and managing to work in a QAnon reference (“Save Our Children“) and managed to shoehorn in a “school boards” besides:

And yet, what started out as a peaceful protest over the store’s refusal to protect its customers turned ugly when counterprotesters, carrying rainbow flags and transgender signs, decided to get in the faces of concerned men and women. Suddenly, the chants of “save our children” were drowned out by a crazed mob that started setting fire to dumpsters and chasing opponents down the streets.

[…]

Unfortunately, Americans are living under an administration that agrees with him. And look at where that’s gotten us. Six months into Biden’s “unity” agenda, fights are breaking out from spas to school boards. If the president doesn’t step back and reconsider where his policies are taking this nation, these next three and a half years will test the endurance of the very fiber of our nation.

The people behind this escalating campaign, then, are known disinformation purveyors allied with open white supremacists who — as they have done for several years now — created optics-heavy, broadcast news-friendly chaos in order to push a specific agenda.

Despite this, the incident has been reported in local and national news storys as a furor over “a biological male” in the woman’s section of a Los Angeles-area Korean day spa, despite the fact that there is no evidence that “CubanaAngel” (who has still not been publicly identified, unlike the many innocent parties dragged into the national gaze and facing harassment and death threats over this stunt) ever saw what she claims, and plenty of evidence that this is nothing but an inauthentically organized, heavily astroturfed campaign aimed at overturning existing California law — with the help of the Heritage Foundation and all its associated networks.

The post Wi Spa Weaponized Disinformation Campaign appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, astroturfing, critical race theory, disinformation, disinformation campaigns, ethnic studies, Heritage Foundation, Immigration, reporting, tanton network, TruthOrFiction, weaponized disinformation

The ‘Critical Race Theory’ Coordinated Disinformation Campaign

An inauthentically organized, corrosive disinformation campaign taking direct aim at social resilience and anti-racism pushes has taken over school boards throughout the United States in what appears to be a highly coordinated national push — which as of June 2021 has made its way from local school boards all the way into state laws.

These hastily-written, often highly vague laws ban critical race theory, which has been an established academic concept for more than four decades:

The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

The moral panic around critical race theory (oftened shortened to simply “CRT”) and also threatening ethnic studies programs is the end result of a weaponized disinformation and propaganda campaign that has also been ongoing for decades. As a result, no one attacking it seems to be able to define it, but Republican-led states have moved swiftly to ban it:

…[I]n the previous five months, taking their cue from conservative activists like Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, and Cornell University Professor William Jacobson, founder of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, thousands of Republican legislators from Vermont and Rhode Island in liberal New England, to solid Republican states like South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Iowa, Idaho and 11 other states, had voted for bills banning Critical Race Theory (CRT) in primary and secondary schools and-or colleges and universities, because it ‘undermines American values’.

Anti-CRT bills have become law in eight states and are set to become law in a further nine states.

At the same time, inauthentically organized and sometimes violent events that are calculated to push scholars and lawmakers out of government and academic positions and put white supremacists and other conspiracy theorists into them have been seeded across the nation, specifically coalescing around local races and school boards, many of which are recorded in this thread: 

One such instance of inauthentic organization in New York City was quickly uncovered by an open-source researcher who was able to link it to a public relations and lobbying firm out of Washington, DC that specializes in right-wing causes:

The Center for Union Facts is a known right wing anti-union organization run by a man dubbed Dr. Evil, Rick Berman. Rick Berman is a DC lobbyist who has fought against Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the Human Society and a slew of other organizations at the behest of moneyed interests via his lobbying group Berman and Co.

Berman & Co. admitted their role in the astroturfing campaign when contacted by reporters for Vice and responded with a statement: 

With support from a diverse group of concerned parents in New York, we launched the Prep School Accountability project. The schools’ defensive response to such an uncontroversial message—teach students how to think, not what to think—shows the overwhelming need for the project. It also explains why most of the parents supporting this project chose not to be identified right now for fear of retaliation or being ‘canceled.’ As the group grows, we expect more parent supporters will choose to be identified publicly.

However, that a lobbying group was organizing and networking “concerned parents” was not disclosed by networks providing them airtime:

As Fox News reported on Monday, the group founded by Berman drove at least one van in front of a New York City prep school. Fox News described the group as “some fed-up parents here in New York City taking it to the next level” and as “anonymous parents.” The Fox News segment does not mention Berman or his firms.

A New York Post also published a follow-up story reporting on the vans showing up at several schools. Just like in the first story, there is no mention of Berman, and the campaign is described as a “$10,000 campaign, which was coordinated by an anonymous group Prep School Accountability.”

The inauthentically organized outrage is not limited to the East Coast. Grifters and gadflies who until fairly recently were still talking about QAnon, “Stop the Steal,” or pushing anti-vaccine conspiracy theories (or some combination of the three) have suddenly pivoted to anti-CRT campaigning all over the country, and the engines of mass disinformation have thrown everything they can into using it as a firehosing tactic.

How to Fight Disinformation — Part I: Firehosing

University of California Humanities Research Director David Theo Goldberg described receiving an early mailer, observing that it was a well-organized and slick campaign, and noted a connection to the Heritage Foundation, which appears to also be part of the push to demonize critical race theory. He also observed there was no attempt to define what it might be, instead relying on vague insinuations and frightening hints: 

When I picked up my mail a few weeks ago, I found a thick hand-addressed envelope with no return address; the contents included an eight-page-long screed denouncing CRT as “hateful fraud.” The documents are copies of resources prepared by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York (CACAGNY), which filed an amicus brief in the failed Supreme Court case challenging what the group characterized as discrimination by Harvard University against Asian American applicants. The materials echo essays sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, which calls CRT “the new intolerance” and “the rejection of the underpinnings of Western civilization.” The materials suggest a more coordinated campaign than many seem to have realized; I am surely not the only one who received this package.

What do all these attacks add up to? The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about. Instead, CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together “multiculturalism,” “wokeism,” “anti-racism,” and “identity politics”—or indeed any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes, the result of choices made by equally positioned individuals in a free society. They are simply against any talk, discussion, mention, analysis, or intimation of race—except to say we shouldn’t talk about it.

Far-right activist Christopher Rufo, the de facto face of this particular campaign, has openly admitted that they are trying to taint the public’s perception of what the entire concept of critical race theory is:

The far right has long set its sights on critical race theory and ethnic studies programs, and there have been a number of disinformation campaigns aimed directly at schools and school boards for years. Some of the same entities behind a previous push are reappearing now to try again.

For example, a scandal-riddled school superintendent named Tom Horne started a similar campaign against ethnic studies programs in Tucson, Arizona in 2010; the rhetoric at the time was almost identical and also involved related, but then far less sophisticated, disinformation networks:

In 2010, then-Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne crafted the law, which led to the elimination of the Mexican-American studies program at Tucson Unified School district.

The law’s language singles out programs that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for a particular ethnic group, or advocate ethnic solidarity rather than treating pupils as individuals.

Many of the questions put to Horne focused on why, specifically, the Mexican-American studies program at TUSD was targeted, and not other ethnic studies programs. Questions also touched on Horne’s earlier efforts to end bilingual education in the state and replace it with language immersion.

Although Horne presented the law he wrote — which was found unconstitutional in 2017 — as a response to a speech he heard by Latina activist Dolores Huerta, the truth is that he already had set ethnic studies in his sights, as he made clear in a 2007 speech that he gave to the Heritage Foundation:

Because of the extreme pressures to achieve proficiency in the subjects that are tested, many schools teach only what is tested. This means that the knowledge of history among American students, which has been abysmally low for many years, has declined precipitously from even that abysmally low level. Many elementary schools teach no history at all. Students arrive in middle school not having heard of Christopher Columbus or George Washington.

A country that does not know its history is like an individual who has lost his memory: He does not know where he has been; he does not know where he is going; and he does not know how to deal with problems. If we are going to be able to preserve our free institutions, our citizens must understand their history. If they are going to have pride in our institutions and want to preserve them, they must know our history in depth.

I am a proponent of a curriculum developed by E. D. Hirsch, called Core Knowledge. Students get a content-rich curriculum in American history, the Greco-Roman basis for Western civilization, and science beginning in kindergarten, first and second grades. As they get older, they can learn history in much greater depth because they have been exposed to it when they are young.

As of May 2021, galvanized by the success of critical race theory bans, Horne has decided he will be running for Arizona schools superintendent.

When viewed through an anti-disinformation lens, coordinated and highly choreographed multipronged attacks such as these appear to be taking direct aim at the entire concept not just of critical race theory but of building resilience, a crucial aspect of withstanding hybrid attacks and active measures across entire societies:

..media systems that are resilient to online disinformation are characterized by distinct structural features, such as a low degree of polarization and fragmentation; a low level of distrust in truth-seeking institutions that operate on reason and evidence (science, law, professionalism); a public health approach toward media regulation; and public funding for reliable truth-seeking media and an educated public.

More generally, resilience refers to a structural context in which disinformation does not reach a large number of citizens. At the same time, we argue that resilience is not only a consequence of simply not being exposed to disinformation. In countries that can be seen as resilient, people might also come across forms of disinformation. In those circumstances, people will be less inclined to support or further distribute such low quality information and, in some cases, they will be more able to counter that information.

In sum, we argue that resilience to online disinformation can be linked to structural factors related to different political, media, and economic environments.

Hybrid strategies are irregular techniques, such as soft propaganda, that aim to win over large portions of populations, as NATO Maj. Gen. Edvardas Mažeikis defined the term in 2017:

A comprehensive strategy to achieve (geo)political and strategic objectives based on a broad, complex, adaptive and often highly integrated combination of conventional and/or unconventional means, overt and/or covert activities, military, paramilitary, irregular and/or civilian actors, conducted across the full spectrum of elements of power (diplomatic/political, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, legal – DIMEFIL) intended to create ambiguity and targeted at an adversary’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Hybrid strategies have a particular focus on decision-making process.

By removing the ability to critically examine at least some of the factors that leave countries vulnerable to hybrid attacks such as weaponized disinformation campaigns, the inauthentically organized anti-CRT push could also potentially leave large portions of the United States unguarded against still more manipulation by bad actors both domestic and foreign.

At the very least, the campaign around these concepts remove the public’s ability to have an honest conversation about critical race theory, its concepts, and its goals — which is exactly what the architects of this particular push openly stated they were trying to do.

The post The ‘Critical Race Theory’ Coordinated Disinformation Campaign appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, china, disinformation, disinformation campaigns, Facebook, gab, graphika, Identifying Fake News, news media, pakistan, parler, reddit, reporting, russia, social media, thedonald.win, trump, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, Viruses, War, Warnings

Foreign Influence Agents Goaded Trump Forums After U.S. Elections, Researchers Say

Foreign agents — particularly those working from or on behalf of Russia — were active on Donald Trump-themed forums in the weeks and months leading up to the January 6 2021 coup attempt at the United States Capitol, a new report says.

According to social media and disinformation research firm Graphika, this particular disinformation operation began just after the November 2020 elections in the United States and pushed a good deal of agitprop, American receptivity to which appears to be waning: 

The newly-identified activity discussed in this report shows that suspected Russian actors retooled and doubled down on efforts to target far-right American audiences after their previous activities were disrupted ahead of the 2020 U.S. election. The actors’ continued presence on alternative platforms that lack rigorous policies on foreign interference has also allowed them to create a direct line to these communities, through which to deliver a stream of tailor-made political content. The sometimes skeptical reaction they received, however, and a failure to achieve significant traction illustrates the operators’ long-standing struggle with content quality and authenticity.

According to Graphika, the content did not pressure nor encourage Americans to behave in any particular way, instead focusing on disseminating crude but effective political cartoons about various public figures in the service of weaponized narratives, such as “Stop the Steal” and the disinformation-driven “audit” of ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County:

In that way, operatives provided a counterpoint of sorts to the drumbeat of plans that were coalescing into what became the Capitol attack. However, this particular network did not post about those plans directly. The content appeared on sites such as TheDonald.win, Gab, and Parler before it was shepherded into the mainstream:

The Gab accounts previously promoted a site called the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens (NAEBC), which Facebook experts said was associated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian government contractor.

Moscow denies interfering in U.S. elections.

“The same suspected Russian actors that targeted the 2020 U.S. election have retooled and doubled down on their efforts,” said Graphika Director of Investigations Jack Stubbs, a former Reuters reporter.

The accounts remain active as of June 2021, as Reuters pointed out:

On Thursday, the most active of the Patriots.win accounts posted “2A is the answer to the corrupt pedo elite,” garnering hundreds of supportive votes. 2A refers to the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protecting the right to bear arms.

Graphika’s findings follow previous reports showing that fake media outlets paid actors and journalists to participate in a hoax public relations narrative supporting Pakistan’s military, and that Trump administration propagandist Steve Bannon had helped develop a vast online network with Chinese businessman Guo Wengui which engages in bad-faith disinformation and harassment campaigns against perceived rivals.

The post Foreign Influence Agents Goaded Trump Forums After U.S. Elections, Researchers Say appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

alexei navalny, analysis, belarus, disinformation, Identifying Fake News, internet, missing persons, news media, reporting, roman protasevich, ryanair, smear campaigns, sofia sapega, Terrorism, TruthOrFiction, War

International Disinfo Machines Turning After State-Sponsored Kidnapping of Belarusian Journalist

On May 24 2021, in the hours and days after Belarusian dissident journalist Roman Protasevich was taken from a Ryanair flight that had been rediverted to Minsk and arrested along with his girlfriend, graduate student Sofia Sapega, in a dramatic state-sponsored kidnapping, a curious phenomenon began to appear: English-language social media accounts suddenly began offering opinions and commentary on his activities and scraping together a very particular narrative.

The incident itself, which involved the Belarusian government calling in a fake bomb threat to force the plane to divert in Minsk, is part of an alarming new trend of transnational surveillance and repression that is being used to silence dissent among critics all over the world:

Recent well-publicized incidents include Russia’s use of nerve agents in an attack against Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, and his daughter, Yulia, in England in 2018. That same year, Saudi Arabia kidnapped and murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist and critic of the government, inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributor, was killed on October 2, 2018, after a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork before marrying his Turkish fiancée.

In the case of Protasevich “they reached into the skies to take somebody,” says Robert English, a professor and director of Central European Studies at the University of Southern California.

Smear campaigns, which aim to destroy carefully built reputations and credibility, are integral to these attacks in order to chill international sympathy. Soon, Protasevich — who Belarus’s government has labeled an extremist — was associated via social media whisper campaign with the far-right, ultranationalist extremists of eastern Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, a white supremacist group that has made no secret of its international aims, as this November 2018 story makes clear:

Robert Rundo, the muscly leader of a California-based white-supremacist group that refers to itself as the “premier MMA (mixed martial arts) club of the Alt-Right,” unleashed a barrage of punches against his opponent.

But Rundo, a 28-year-old Huntington Beach resident who would be charged and arrested in October over a series of violent attacks in his hometown, Berkeley, and San Bernardino in 2017, wasn’t fighting on American streets.

It was April 27 and Rundo, whose Rise Above Movement (RAM) has been described by ProPublica as “explicitly violent,” was swinging gloved fists at a Ukrainian contender in the caged ring of a fight club associated with the far-right ultranationalist Azov group in Kyiv.

A video of Rundo’s fight, which was streamed live on Facebook (below), shows that the American lost the bout. But for Rundo, who thanked his hosts with a shout of “Slava Ukrayini!” (Glory to Ukraine), it was a victory of another sort: RAM’s outreach tour, which included stops in Italy and Germany to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday and spread its alt-right agenda, brought the two radical groups closer together.

For the Ukrainians, too, the benefits extended outside the ring. It marked a step toward legitimizing Azov among its counterparts in the West and set in motion what appears to be its next project: the expansion of its movement abroad.

“We think globally,” Olena Semenyaka, the international secretary for Azov’s political wing, the National Corps, told RFE/RL in an interview at one of the group’s Kyiv offices last week.

It took almost no time at all for commenters across platforms to start sowing doubt about Protasevich’s activies and alliances:

The rumors about Protasevich appeared to hinge on several inconclusive photographs and extensive narrative shaping. Soon, the whisper campaign reached reporters doing open-source investigations, with additional wrenches thrown into the mix by “admissions” by batallion leaders that he had been part of their effort:

Finally, it appears that enough evidence emerged to form a more complete picture of what the rumor was, although it still remains murky:

The way the discussion unfolded, from hinting to outright rumors to investigation to a tentative conclusion, may look familiar to those who have watched weaponized disinformation campaigns latch on to people in the past. As mentioned, claims and smears are often attached by repressive regimes and other anti-democratic entities to those who end up in the spotlight, whether they are political dissidents speaking out about repression or victims of state-sponsored violence murdered by law enforcement officers on camera.

Whatever truth remains to be uncovered, the ensuing discussions and bad faith claims worked well as a distraction device and to obscure the facts of the situation, which are that two people — a graduate student and a journalist — were abducted from an international flight from Greece to Lithuania, where Sofia Sapega was reportedly preparing to defend her master’s thesis. Additionally, this was done at the behest of a repressive government, in a move that came amid a whole slew of anti-democratic and explicitly authoritarian trends sweeping countries that until recent years had been considered relatively stable democracies.

The post International Disinfo Machines Turning After State-Sponsored Kidnapping of Belarusian Journalist appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

american politics, cartographic disinformation, cartography, disinformation, election maps, Fact Checks, map disinformation, maps, political maps, Politics, tabytchi, TruthOrFiction, viral content

‘There Is No Such Thing as a Blue State, Only Blue Cities’ Tweet

In early May 2021, a tweet showing a map of the United States swathed in mostly red with a scattering of blue appeared, and it quickly went viral:

The text that accompanied the image, from an account going by @TABYTCHI, said:

There is no such thing as a blue state, only blue cities.

The outrage-bait tweet received a lot of replies and comments from people both agreeing with and disputing with what the map apparently showed. However, few seemed to remark on the fact that this map is divided up by counties rather than cities before even getting into what it represented — making it already inaccurate on its face, as this map, appropriately titled “Counties and Statistically Equivalent Areas of the United States of America, Including Island Areas” from the U.S. Census Bureau shows:

We also thought that the tweeted map looked extremely familiar, so we ran a reverse image search. Sure enough, almost identical maps have been floating around and used for similar disinformation campaigns for years:

There are some small differences between the maps, but the one or two counties whose colors were swapped appear not to be in the interest of accuracy, but to perhaps confound fact-checkers who use reverse image searches in the course of their work. It also strongly resembled a map on Wikipedia showing votes by county in 2016.

At any rate, it’s a moot point where this map came from, because it was being used to make two points: First, that blue regions are geographically small and concentrated and that the size of counties and states matter more than the number of people who vote in them; and second, this map made the indirect claim that this showed the 2021 reality of the United States.

Both are untrue, making this claim misleading at best, but outright disinformation at worst. A more credible and accurate map reflecting the political reality on the ground as of November 2020 would look more like this:

Maps are their own genre of disinformation, as they are generally visual guides that carry with them a high level of perceived authority despite never being completely accurate by their very nature, which makes them absolutely ripe for lending an extra layer of virality to hoaxes and scams on social media:

The famous book ‘How To Lie With Maps’ by Mark Monmonier said explicitly that: All maps lie. Cartographers have always been presented with the same impossible dilemma of projecting a three-dimensional object (the earth) onto a two-dimensional surface. The results are always distortions of the truth, ”an imperfect model of reality,” according to Cairo.

“Not necessarily as a conscious effort to mislead you, but maps are never reality itself. Sometimes people forget about this.”

“We will always have ‘better or worse’ maps, but never ‘true’, and we should avoid binary thinking as much as possible, thinking more in terms of the spectrum of reality: Is this map better or worse in representing the phenomenon that it is intended to represent?” he added.

While there are no foolproof ways to check the relative accuracy of maps without knowing the data that underlies their visualizations, it can be helpful to the political discourse — and online discussions in general — not to share maps making or bolstering claims without offering authorship or citations.

The post ‘There Is No Such Thing as a Blue State, Only Blue Cities’ Tweet appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

anti-vaccine, antivaxxers, covid-19, disinformation, Facebook, Identifying Fake News, mercola, natural news, news media, pandemic, reporting, TruthOrFiction, twitter, Viruses

Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Still Going Strong on Social Media: Report

Just twelve accounts are responsible for fully two-thirds of online disinformation about vaccines — but social media platforms still aren’t doing much about them.

In a follow-up to a report tracking a majority of disinformation about vaccines to only a dozen accounts online, researchers from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Vax Watch say platforms have still taken almost no action to counter harmful, sometimes fatal lies about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The original March 2021 report (“The Disinformation Dozen: Why platforms must act on twelve leading online anti-vaxxers”) delves into what it has designated the worst offenders in the anti-vaccine “movement,” a highly astroturfed and inauthentically organized world that relies on a few major influencers for its campaigns:

Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who do not have relevant medical expertise and have their own pockets to line, who are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines. According to our recent report, anti-vaccine activists on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers, making these the largest and most important social media platforms for anti-vaxxers.4 Our research has also found anti-vaxxers using social media platforms to target Black Americans, exploiting higher rates of vaccine hesitancy in that community to spread conspiracies and lies about the safety of Covid vaccines.

Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies. All have been particularly ineffective at removing harmful and dangerous misinformation about coronavirus vaccines, though the scale of misinformation on Facebook, and thus the impact of their failure, is larger.

The full list of the entities CCDH identified as the “Disinformation Dozen” are likely already well known to anybody who has done research in the anti-vaccine and anti-masking disinformation space: Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Ty and Charlene Bollinger, Sherri Tenpenny, Rizza Islam, Rashid Buttar, Erin Elizabeth, Sayer Ji, Kelly Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Ben Tapper, and Kevin Jenkins.

It also called on tech companies to deplatform organizations that it has identified as networks used to spread harmful messaging:

• Children’s Health Defense (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)
• Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) (Del Bigtree)
• National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) (Barbara Loe Fisher, Joseph Mercola)
• Organic Consumers Association (OCA) (Joseph Mercola)
• Millions Against Medical Mandates

The initial report also recommended clear thresholds for triggering enforcement from moderators, banning private or secret anti-vaccine groups, and other actions to crack down on harmful disinformation and propaganda campaigns during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed millions of lives globally and continues to peak and ebb in waves.

American legislators and attorneys-general also sent letters to the chief executive officers of Facebook and Twitter asking them to do more to stop misinformation and disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic broadly, and vaccines in particular:

“For too long, social media platforms have failed to adequately protect Americans by not taking sufficient action to prevent the spread of vaccine disinformation online,” wrote Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) in a Friday letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was viewed by Recode. “Despite your policies intended to prevent vaccine disinformation, many of these accounts continue to post content that reach millions of users, repeatedly violating your policies with impunity.”

During an April 27 2021 Senate hearing into online disinformation campaigns and how they are potentially aided by algorithms whose very existence, to say nothing of their intended purpose, is obscured, a Facebook representative claimed that there are already measures in place to dampen the spread of damaging falsehoods and lies.

However, as the follow-up report pointed out, little has been done.  In fact, most of those very same disinformation purveyors are posting unabated:

As the platforms themselves are opaque about the reach and impact of any post, we elected to represent the total potential impact using “potential impressions”. We calculated this metric by taking each violating post and multiplying it by the number of followers of the posting account as of 24 April 2021.

This process revealed that the Disinformation Dozen have posted 105 pieces of content that violate platform service agreements in the month since members of Congress called on tech CEOs to deplatform them.

This content generated up to 29 million potential impressions from the existing followers of Disinformation Dozen accounts, not including the reach of Facebook’s private groups, hidden messages and other tactics being used by leading anti-vaxxers to continue to operate amid heightened scrutiny by our groups and others.

Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s terms of service agreements, half of the Disinformation Dozen remain on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Nine of the 12 remain on Facebook, 10 of the 12 remain on Twitter, and 9 of the 12 remain on Instagram, with no discernible consistency or transparency in how platforms treat violations.

The influence of professional anti-vaccine propaganda is no mere abstraction, either. As with other disinformation campaigns, it has real-world effects ranging from concerning to hideous. For example, a March 2021 poll indicated that fully one in four Americans would refuse the COVID-19 vaccine outright, with many citing concerns about complications that are based on rumor, innuendo, hearsay, and outright lies — which can often be traced back to one of the twelve worst offenders detailed in the CCDH/Anti-Vax Watch report.

The post Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Still Going Strong on Social Media: Report appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

#QAnon, disinformation, donald trump, freedom caucus, marjorie taylor greene, propaganda, reporting, TruthOrFiction, U.S. Capitol Riot

Far-Right U.S. Legislators Using Disinformation to Gain, Strengthen Positions

Even as acolytes of former United States president Donald Trump consider running to replace retiring Republicans, his allies already in the U.S. government are trying to throw up barriers to passing broadly popular legislation — but all are leaning on the same weaponized disinformation and conspiracy theories to do so.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican who is perhaps best known for her embrace of QAnon and election trutherism, acknowledged that she was attempting to force roll call votes in a statement that was riddled with disinformation:

The American people deserve to know where their member of Congress stands with a roll call vote,” Greene said in a statement to CNN. “While thousands of illegal aliens are invading Biden’s open border, American kids are losing their education with closed schools, thousands of small businesses have been forced to shut down, the People really don’t care about politicians whining about voting and doing their job for 10 hours.”

However, the suspension bills before Congress on Monday had nothing to do with the topics Greene claims she was focused on. Instead, they addressed issues like child abuse treatment and prevention, literacy and credit management. Three of the bills were even sponsored by Greene’s fellow Republicans.

Roll call votes can add several hours to otherwise unremarkable and bipartisan votes, particularly during a pandemic and related restrictions.

Meanwhile, some of Greene’s fellow supporters of Donald Trump are responding to several Republican retirements by announcing their intentions to run for higher office via newly-open seats and leaning on those same widely discredited, weaponized conspiracy theories — particularly the lie that the November 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump — to help their chances to further gain or consolidate power:

But even in states won by President Joe Biden, such as Arizona and Georgia, some of the former president’s most loyal devotees are willing to test their political fortunes, hoping to seize on a deep but baseless belief on the right that the election was stolen.

[…]

During the Trump years, a cohort of House Republicans built national profiles and padded their war chests defending the ex-president throughout multiple investigations and impeachments. Now, amid an intense internal debate over the future of the GOP, some of those same lawmakers are looking to use their newfound stardom on the right as a springboard to higher office — even after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and the GOP lost the House, Senate and White House under Trump.

Among the Republicans considering a Senate run are Brooks, who spearheaded the effort to challenge the election results while Shelby voted to certify Biden’s win; Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, who chairs the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus and hails from a state where the legislature amplified Trump’s false voter fraud claims; and Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio, a hardliner who replaced former Speaker John Boehner in Congress.

However, strategists and analysts caution that an appeal to conspiracy-driven, confrontational far-right politics could — as well as being an enormously destructive force — also be a major boon to the Democratic Party as voters across the United States, fed up with violent rhetoric and weaponized lies, look elsewhere for represention.

The post Far-Right U.S. Legislators Using Disinformation to Gain, Strengthen Positions appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

Fact Checks, financial disinformation, gamestonk, gamestop, Money / Financial, reddit, robinhood, TruthOrFiction, twitter, viral content

Did Robinhood Announce it Is ‘Upgrading its Systems’?

On February 24 2021, not long after buyers using financial app Robinhood rattled money pundits everywhere, a tweet appeared to signify that something new was afoot:

The tweet immediately received a lot of attention, including from day trader Dave Portnoy, who has had an ongoing public spat with Robinhood’s chief executive officer, Vlad Tenev:

(Archived here.)

However, this is not an official Robinhood account, as the account itself quickly made clear with a puckish follow-up tweet:

The profile of the @TradeRobinhood account also makes clear that it is not an officially sanctioned page:

We track the gamblers and degenerates of the trading community. Not associated with Robinhood. Tweets are not endorsements

Joined January 2021

Tenev himself weighed in with a link to a video of Jonathan Frakes repeating variations on “you’re wrong”:

The account also managed to fool Joe Pompliano of sports business newsletter Huddle Up as well:

Robinhood went from a popular trading app and occasional newsmaker to a subject of a deluge of news stories worldwide in January 2021 after the controversy around GameStop (and other) stocks:

Robinhood played a critical role when a group of Reddit posters saw an opportunity to make money while also giving a jab to Wall Street and hedge funds. However, Robinhood then slowed the stratospheric rise in GameStop and other companies when it restricted users from buying certain stocks. It reversed that decision the next day and posted on its blog about what happened in all that stock trading.

The fallout has included everything from bad press to class-action lawsuits — and a discussion about who the Robinhood app is really intended for, anyway:

Payment for order flow wasn’t invented by Robinhood (that honor belongs to Bernie Madoff), but the company’s technique differs from others who use it in the industry in that it charges a percentage of the order spread. In 2020, payment of order flow has made the company a killing: for the first quarter, it accounted for $90 million in revenue for the company (70 percent), by the second it doubled to $180 million.

Payment for order flow is a wonderful system that makes a lot of money for everyone involved, except the consumer.

In December, Robinhood was fined $65 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission for “misleading statements and omissions in customer communications” about its revenue, but specifically around its payment of order flow process.

Since then, Robinhood has been both praised and criticized for its actions. However, @TradeRobinhood is not an official Robinhood account, and its tweets should be considered accordingly.

The post Did Robinhood Announce it Is ‘Upgrading its Systems’? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, authoritarianism, building resilience, democracy, disinformation, firehosing, gaslighting, Identifying Fake News, news media, propaganda, reporting, trump, TruthOrFiction

How to Fight Disinformation: Part II — Gaslighting

This is part of an ongoing series about how communities can fight back and protect themselves against weaponized disinformation. You can read Part I here.

On January 6 2021, a mob of Donald Trump supporters, enraged by corrosive rhetoric and lies from public figures spread on social media, stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.

Almost immediately after that, the gaslighting began.

“They were masquerading as Trump supporters, and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa,” claimed Matt Gaetz, citing a Washington Times story claiming that facial recognition had discovered the nonexistent subterfuge. The fact that the story was almost immediately thoroughly debunked and quietly removed from the site did nothing to curtail it from persisting, like a bad smell, as hearsay and rumor. “Do not be surprised if we learn in the days ahead that the Trump rioters were infiltrated by leftist extremists. Note: this is not to excuse any of them,” added right-wing commentator Brit Hume, enthusiastically pouring gasoline on the rhetorical fire.

Their interpretation of the events were so far removed from verifiable fact as to be brazen attacks on reality from established purveyors of weaponized disinformation:

Lin Wood, an attorney who has filed lawsuits seeking to overturn the presidential election, said on Parler that he had “indisputable photographic evidence” of antifa involvement. Twitter suspended his account for claiming the Capitol breach was “staged.”

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin warned of “fake DC ‘patriots’ used as PLANTS.” Other Republican politicians promoted similar rumors about antifa, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama.

“This has all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation,” Gosar tweeted at 2:04 p.m.

“Rumor: ANTIFA fascists in backwards MAGA hats,” Brooks added 16 minutes later.

Some were outraged; others bemused (why would anti-fascists, who have routinely protested Donald Trump’s policies and activities as president, work to keep him in office); still others accepted the lie from authority figures wholesale, leaving increasingly exhausted journalists to try to sift through the mess to find the bedrock of reality beneath.

And that, of course, is the mechanism and goal of gaslighting. If you can’t use it to persuade people or pull the wool over their eyes, you can at least use a volatile mix of blatant lies and emotional manipulation in order to perplex and confuse them into ideological paralysis as they argue over their own interpretations of what really happened — or at the very least, distract them from paying attention to one topic or action by claiming or doing something outrageous. And so it ever was, as political theorist Hannah Arendt points out in her classic essay, “Truth and Politics”:

The story of the conflict between truth and politics is an old and complicated one, and nothing would be gained by simplification or moral denunciation. Throughout history, the truth-seekers and truthtellers have been aware of the risks of their business; as long as they did not interfere with the course of the world, they were covered with ridicule, but he who forced his fellow citizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehood and illusion was in danger of his life: “If they could lay hands on [such a] man . . . they would kill him,” Plato says in the last sentence of the cave allegory.

The Platonic conflict between truthteller and citizens cannot be explained by the Latin adage, or any of the later theories that, implicitly or explicitly, justify lying, among other transgressions, if the survival of the city is at stake. No enemy is mentioned in Plato’s story; the many live peacefully in their cave among themselves, mere spectators of images, involved in no action and hence threatened by nobody. The members of this community have no reason whatever to regard truth and truthtellers as their worst enemies, and Plato offers no explanation of their perverse love of deception and falsehood.

“Gaslight,” when used as a verb rather than a noun, is a relatively new word — it comes from the 1938 play Gas Light (which was subsequently turned into a 1944 film called Gaslight, shortened to just one word) about a man who lies to his wife to cover up his crimes and is able to convince herself and everyone around her that she is insane — but that does not mean the concept is new. Lies so outrageous that they challenge the very bedrock of the reality that we all share have been used by the corrupt for personal or political gain since well before such a term existed.  The eventual goal, as Arendt points out later in her essay, is to create an exhausted population which can be convinced to feel that truth and facts are malleable, making their collective behavior easier to control (a diabolically effective technique when paired with firehosing):

What seems even more disturbing is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions – as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion. Since such factual truths concern issues of immediate political relevance, there is more at stake here than the perhaps inevitable tension between two ways of life within the framework of a common and commonly recognized reality. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. And since factual truth, though it is so much less open to argument than philosophical truth, and so obviously within the grasp of everybody, seems often to suffer a similar fate when it is exposed in the market place – namely, to be countered not by lies and deliberate falsehoods but by opinion – it may be worth while to reopen the old and apparently obsolete question of truth versus opinion.

But just because it was always that way does not mean our response to it cannot and should not change. The technique itself has changed and evolved with the times, so as with so many other forms of emotional abuse turned into political manipulation, it has been given far more speed and scale and therefore power by social media and its weaponized algorithms. “A lie can make it halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” as the perhaps apocryphal saying goes, but thanks to social media, a carefully crafted lie can now circle the world three times, be enshrined into national policy, and spark an international conflict before the truth even rolls over to turn off the alarm.

And the response can similarly evolve. Weaponized gaslighting attacks produce the same sense of unreality, no matter the scale, which come with the same problems. And just as abusive partners work to isolate their victims from friends and family members who might snap them out of the spell of lies they have woven, so too do gaslighting leaders attack the press:

When it comes to politics, the signs are similar. You may feel confused and alone in the world, assuming nobody understands your point of view and that it must therefore be wrong. Take racism. You may have known exactly what it is. But when Trump accused US Congresswomen of colour of “racist hatred” in response to himself being criticised for racist remarks against them, this could have sown confusion about what racism actually means.

It is similarly hard to complain to a gaslighting leader. Several journalists who have questioned Trump have simply been banned from his conferences and told they do fake news.

So, how to fight the scourge of gaslighting, firehosing, and other attacks by public officials on American institutions, individuals, the nature of reality itself?

It turns out that the best defense against such a weapon is getting out ahead of it, says disinformation expert Stephan Lewandowsky, who points out there is a lot of truth in the adage, “Forewarned is forearmed” (and never more so than during protracted disinformation attacks):

If people are made aware that they might be misled before the misinformation is presented, there is evidence that people become resilient to the misinformation.

This process is variously known as ‘inoculation’ or ‘prebunking’ and it comes in a number of different forms. At the most general level, an upfront warning may be sufficient to reduce – but not eliminate – subsequent reliance on misinformation. In one of our studies, led by Ullrich Ecker, we found that telling participants at the outset that ‘the media sometimes does not check facts before publishing information that turns out to be inaccurate’ reduced reliance modestly (but significantly) in comparison to a retraction-only condition. A more specific warning that explained that ‘research has shown that people continue to rely on outdated information even when it has been retracted or corrected’, by contrast, reduced subsequent reliance on misinformation to the same level as was observed with a causal alternative.

A more involved variant of inoculation not only provides an explicit warning of the impending threat of misinformation, but it additionally refutes an anticipated argument that exposes the imminent fallacy. In the same way that a vaccination stimulates the body into generating antibodies by imitating an infection, which can then fight the real disease when an actual infection occurs, psychological inoculation stimulates the generation of counter-arguments that prevent subsequent misinformation from sticking.

It is remarkable how well debunking a disinformation narrative in advance, or even in its very early stages before it can truly take hold, can short-circuit its purveyors’ and useful idiots’ claims; the flip side of propaganda campaigns on social media is that because they are public by design, they can be countered by anyone with open-source citations. It is helpful for social groups online to form informal networks and groups dedicated to countering harmful disinformation before it really takes hold, and brigading and mass reporting those who try to direct harmful, untruthful narratives.

But what about once it has already hooked itself into the national discussion? It is always more difficult to excavate a falsity that has grown roots into a topic than it is to prevent it from growing them to begin with. But it is not impossible. Fighting “Big Lies” takes patience, a willingness to confront lies and to tell the truth, and access to either primary sources or vetted secondary ones. In other words, it takes journalism. But if you are not a journalist, you can help them by keeping score, as a 2016 article in Teen Vogue (the headline of which, incidentally, is “Trump Is Gaslighting America”) details:

There are things you can and should be doing to turn your unrest into action, but first let’s empower ourselves with information. Insist on fact-checking every Trump statement you read, every headline you share or even relay to a friend over coffee. If you find factual inaccuracies in an article, send an email to the editor and explain how things should have been clearer. Inform yourself about which outlets are trustworthy and which aren’t. If you need extra help, seek out a browser extension that flags misleading sites or print out a list of fake outlets, such as the one by communications professor Melissa Zimdars, and tape it to your laptop. Do a thorough search before believing the agenda Trump distributes on Twitter. Refuse to accept information simply because it is fed to you, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. That is now the base level of what is required of all Americans. If facts become a point of debate, the very definition of freedom will be called into question.

It will be far easier to take on Trump’s words when there is no question of what he’s said or whether he means it. Regardless of your beliefs, we all must insist on that level of transparency. Trump is no longer some reality-TV clown who used to fire people on The Apprentice. He is the president of the United States.

Credible and vetted news organizations go to the trouble of sifting through the daily chaff of lies and misinterpretation to get at the truth, effectively facilitating a conversation between the public and the policymakers whose decisions affect everyone. Historians collect and interpret such events over time, and sociologists put them into perspective. The rest of the human sciences also play roles in building society-wide resilience against disinformation and propaganda. Because these fields essentially play the role of truth-tellers in the relationship between the people, their perspectives, and their politicians, they are always the first to be attacked and isolated. But they must be seen as what they truly are — bulwarks against disinformation campaigns and Big Lies such as those being inflicted on the United States in January 2021, in the days immediately following a right-wing, deadly insurrection attempt.

But you cannot simply offer up facts and wait for them to vanquish gaslighters. If it was that easy, fact-checkers would have put themselves out of work by now. Instead, the public must learn to build resilience to weaponized rhetoric and political lies. Such a feat involves agreeing on a shared reality and refusing to entertain bad actors with a history of lies. To do otherwise eventually erodes the victim’s confidence to tell truth from lies at all:

Gaslighting and mobilizing both target the lower-level code of citizens: to change how we handle evidence, whether disquieting or hopeful in character. Gaslit citizens have been manipulated in a morally distinctive way, one that targets a particular epistemic mechanism, our evidence about our evidence. Such manipulation poses a real threat to our agency — perversely making us complicit in this process.

Yet insisting on exercising our own epistemic capacities, and fortifying against gaslighting, threatens our ability to sustain meaningful political action with others. What’s at stake is the felt need of citizenship — to see our own agency in our home institutions. In ordinary life, we experience our agency most dramatically when we manage to stick to commitments over time, allowing us to complete difficult and risky projects. That need is no less significant in democratic politics, where confidence that we will be jointly efficacious is part of the price of admission.

And what does building resilience to disinformation attacks look like? It will look different for every country, but the basic requirements do not change. It requires a society-wide approach, which starts with self-reflection about our own vulnerabilities as individuals and nations and empowering independent journalism and other democratic institutions, and continues with all of us, the population at large, privately and publicly standing up for the truth both online and off. Resilience to disinformation campaigns demands stricter guidelines and rules to keep extremists, propagandists, and other information warmongers out of power. It also requires mutual aid and co-operation — as well as tolerating a certain amount of friction in the national discourse for the sake of arguing out differences. It will take education offensives, journalism foundations, and scrutiny of what renders us vulnerable. It will not be easy to do, but it must be done — because the only alternative to systemic change is losing democracy to authoritarianism altogether.

The post How to Fight Disinformation: Part II — Gaslighting appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

Fact Checks, Politics, TruthOrFiction, viral content

Does This Photograph Show a Tour Group the Day Before the Capitol Insurrection?

As the United States continued to grapple with a destructive and deadly right-wing riot at the Capitol building on January 6 2021, disturbing stories from Democratic Party lawmakers began to trickle out indicating that some participants may have planned or coordinated attacks. “My office, if you don’t know where it is, you ain’t going to find it by accident,” said House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn.

“And the one place where my name is on the door, that office is right on Statuary Hall. They didn’t touch that door, but they went into that other place where I do most of my work, they showed up there harassing my staff… They went where you won’t find my name, but they found where I was supposed to be. So something else was going on untoward here.”

Other high-profile members of Congress had similar stories:

And Rep. Mikie Sherrill said that some members of Congress led groups of people the day before the Capitol riots on what she described as “reconnaissance” tours,adding:

We can’t have a democracy if members of Congress are actively helping the president overturn the elections results.

And so not only do I intend to see that the president is removed and never runs for office again and doesn’t have access to classified material, I also intend to see that those members of Congress who abetted him; those members of Congress who had groups coming through the Capitol that I saw on Jan. 5 — a reconnaissance for the next day; those members of Congress that incited this violent crowd; those members of Congress that attempted to help our president undermine our democracy; I’m going to see they are held accountable, and if necessary, ensure that they don’t serve in Congress.

Shortly after these accounts were made public, an image showing far-right newcomer from Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert alongside a group of people apparently on the Capitol steps (several of whom were openly displaying the white supremacist “OK” hand sign) appeared from various accounts with text claiming that it was taken on January 5 2021 — either heavily implying or outright stating that Boebert was leading one of those reconnaissance groups and therefore was directly implicated in the right-wing riots:

However, while the image does show Boebert with a group of far-right protesters agitating against gun control, the date and description are misleading. The photograph was taken in December 2019, not January 2021, and it was snapped in front of the Colorado state capitol building, not the Capitol in Washington, D.C., during an armed right-wing protest there:

Approximately two hundred people rallied at the state Capitol Saturday against Colorado’s new “red flag” law, which allows guns to be taken from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

Organizers of the “We Will Not Comply” rally included Rally For Our Rights activist Lesley Hollywood, conservative Facebook personality Sheronna Bishop, and gun rights activist Lauren Boebert, who just launched her campaign for Colorado’s Third Congressional District, where she will challenge incumbent U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton in the Republican primary.

Conservative activist Sherronna Bishop, who runs a Facebook page called “America’s Mom,” emceed the event. She thanked two groups for providing security: Boots On The Ground Bikers For Trump, and the Three Percenters.

The image appeared in the story with the following description:

Lauren Boebert poses w/ members of American Patriot III% and Bikers for Trump

It is true that this is an image of Lauren Boebert with a group of far right demonstrators. However, the photograph was taken in December 2019, not January 2021, and in Colorado, not Washington, DC. This does not disprove claims of reconnaissance tours the day before the Capitol insurrection attempt, however; it simply does not constitute evidence of them.

The post Does This Photograph Show a Tour Group the Day Before the Capitol Insurrection? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, coup attempt, Democratic Party, disinformation, election fraud, far right power grab, gop, Government, pennsylvania, reporting, Republican Party, TruthOrFiction, voter fraud

Citing Conspiracy Theories, Pennsylvania Republicans Refuse to Seat Democratic Party Senator

As Pennsylvania’s legislature convened on January 5 2021 to commence its new two-year session, its Republican majority is blocking Sen. Jim Brewster (a Democrat) of Allegheny County from taking the oath of office:

At the heart of the dispute is Republican Nicole Ziccarelli’s request to throw out several hundred mail ballots that lacked a handwritten date on the outer ballot envelope, as required by state law. Those ballots gave Brewster the edge he needed to eke out a win.

The issue has already been litigated in the state court system, where Ziccarelli ultimately lost.

“We believe this is an illegal, unlawful attempt not to seat Sen. Brewster,” said Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny). He described the maneuver as out of the “Trump playbook” of contesting legitimate and certified election results.

Sen. Vincent Hughes (D., Philadelphia) put it this way: “It’s a robbery.”

Pennsylvania Democrats responded by trying to prevent anyone from being sworn in, as Brewster’s win has already been certified; as a result, the Republican majority removed the state’s lieutenant governor from the chambers:

Amid high emotions and partisan fingerpointing, Republicans also took the rare step of removing the Democratic lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, from presiding over the session. They apparently did so because they did not believe Fetterman was following the rules and recognizing their legislative motions.

For now, at least, Democratic state Sen. Jim Brewster, of Allegheny County, will not be allowed to take the oath of office, as Republicans believe litigation over the outcome in his race must first play out in the courts.

At issue are several hundred ballots that voters mailed in without writing the dates on the envelopes, which the Republican challenger says renders them invalid, despite the fact that they were previously received and processed with no problems or concerns:

Ms. Ziccarelli is suing Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the Allegheny County Board of Elections in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Ms. Ziccarelli is alleging that the county’s decision to count the ballots — which were missing a printed date on the outer envelope but otherwise correct and proven to have been submitted on time — dilutes other votes and constitutes a due process and equal protection violation of the U.S. Constitution.

[…]

The state Supreme Court had upheld the counting of the ballots in November, reinstating the decision of a lower court that had read the “lack of a written date on an otherwise qualified ballot is a minor technical defect that does not render it deficient.”

But Ms. Ziccarelli is seeking a judgment in federal court now that declares the counting of the ballots to be unconstitutional. The court rejected the Republican’s request to quickly stop the certification before it happened, but the case, on its merits, continues.

The final briefs are due January 8 2021. Meanwhile, reporters are observing that the changes that Republicans say invalidate votes for state Democrats were originally pushed by the GOP:

The Republican Party has set the stage for such an action since November, when presidential incumbent Donald Trump’s resoundingly lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Since then, the GOP has done all it can to cast doubt on the validity of votes for Democratic Party candidates in every state, floating baseless conspiracy theories about “voter fraud” and “stolen elections” that directly contradict provable, tangible reality.

The post Citing Conspiracy Theories, Pennsylvania Republicans Refuse to Seat Democratic Party Senator appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, building resilience, disinformation, firehosing, information warfare, propaganda, reporting, TruthOrFiction

How to Fight Disinformation — Part I: Firehosing

This is part of an ongoing series about how communities can fight back and protect themselves against weaponized disinformation.

Any anthropologist can tell you that human lives are created, bounded, and defined by stories: the stories we tell ourselves about us, each other, the world around us, and what might lie beyond. And any propagandist can tell you that you can change future human behavior by changing those stories. Without mapping out what we have done, we cannot know what is possible.

Journalist and resolutely anti-fascist author George Orwell knew this; his seminal, dystopian work 1984 contains the following slogan from the authoritarian Party in power. “Who controls the past,” it says, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

It may be a cliche to include an Orwell quote in an article about disinformation, but sometimes cliches exist for good reason; in this case, it is the entire basis of the sort of psychological attacks that have been leveled against the people of the world since at least 2016.

It is also one of the strongest weapons that social media can be harnessed to use against the public at large by offering a speed and scale previously undreamed of by even the most ardent propagandist. What is one surefire way to erase the recent past from the public consciousness in order to write over it on a newly clean historic slate?

You flood it out, of course. “Firehosing” is a Kremlin-originated technique that the Rand Corporation called in a 2016 report, “the firehose of falsehood,” and which indicted fraudster Steve Bannon, inexplicably regarded as a political genius for far too long, called “flooding the zone with shit.” Both analogies are accurate. The “flood” or the “firehose” is a relentless spray of factual and counterfactual stories, emotional pleas and emotional violence, and abusive rhetoric and invective that so quickly gets carried over into national and global conversations and from there into policy that there is almost no time to fact-check it.

Much of this spray is what the European Union’s anti-disinformation effort calls “InfoShum,” that is, “white noise” that has no purpose other than to overwhelm or flood out certain narratives, and what they simply refer to as “bullshit,” which exists to push specific other narratives, facts be damned:

Why would anyone spread bullshit? In the end, the goal is to occupy the information space.

As we flagged in February, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a Kremlin-funded think tank, published an essay titled “Securing Information for Foreign Policy Purposes in the Context of Digital Reality”. The paper claimed that:

“A preventively shaped narrative, answering to the national interests of the state, can significantly diminish the impact of foreign forces’ activities in the information sphere, as they, as a rule, attempt to occupy “voids” [in the information flow].”

This strategy points to the ambition to take away attention from a certain truth. Therefore one who applies this strategy is a liar, not a bullshitter.

However, both the tactical liar and the bullshitter share an attitude. Substance is secondary, and the primary goal is to flood the information system.

With this perspective, even false information that does not seem to be directly harmful, is dangerous because it occupies space, hurting the general conditions to establish truth.

This is not a technique that traditional fact-checking can easily combat on its own, which the Rand Corporation pointed out in a 2016 report, and which has been proven again and again to be true in the years since:

We are not optimistic about the effectiveness of traditional counterpropaganda efforts. Certainly, some effort must be made to point out falsehoods and inconsistencies, but the same psychological evidence that shows how falsehood and inconsistency gain traction also tells us that retractions and refutations are seldom effective. Especially after a significant amount of time has passed, people will have trouble recalling which information they have received is the disinformation and which is the truth. Put simply, our first suggestion is don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.

Repetition leads to familiarity and in turn, acceptance or resignation. This spray of false, misleading, or decontextualized information has another insidious and very deliberate secondary effect over time: Journalists and fact-checkers (those wielders of squirt guns) become burned out, and so too becomes the public at large; people become dispirited, disheartened, and unable to see beyond the immediate present to a brighter future, much less fight for it.

As mentioned, this is intentional. Nihilism or hopelessness are the intended side effects of models such as these, and the model is difficult to counter by design. But it can still be countered with adjustments, such as anticipating which narratives will be attacked or spread and on whose behalf, and explaining who might benefit:

Forewarning is perhaps more effective than retractions or refutation of propaganda that has already been received. The research suggests two possible avenues:

Propagandists gain advantage by offering the first impression, which is hard to overcome. If, however, potential audiences have already been primed with correct information, the disinformation finds itself in the same role as a retraction or refutation: disadvantaged relative to what is already known.35

When people resist persuasion or influence, that act reinforces their preexisting beliefs.36 It may be more productive to highlight the ways in which Russian propagandists attempt to manipulate audiences, rather than fighting the specific manipulations.

In an information space that is defined by this sort of high volume and high stress, it is extremely easy for even the most battle-scarred adversaries of disinformation to occasionally fall for a hoax or an emotionally charged, convincing mistruth.

“We think we’re so smart — and then you get online and you’re inattentive and suddenly, you’re being manipulated,” Christopher Paul — co-author of the aforementioned paper, “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It,” told us. Researchers have for years pointed out the existence of bias blind spots, which — as the name implies — describes how even the most savvy reader (yes, including you) can be occasionally snookered.

In fact, there is some evidence that higher intelligence might mean a larger propensity toward a bias blind spot, as a study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the City University London, Boston University, and the University of Colorado, Boulder and published in the journal Management Science (“Bias Blind Spot: Structure, Measurement, and Consequences”) pointed out in 2015:

Participants who reported significantly higher openness to experience had higher bias blind spot scores, although the moderate size of the coefficient suggests that the two constructs are sufficiently discriminated. This result was not predicted. Because open-minded thinking has been shown to correlate with superior cognitive ability in a number of domains (Stanovich and West 2007, West et al. 2008), it is possible that if people high in openness to experience have both superior cognitive ability and some awareness of that ability, they might accurately report that they are less susceptible to bias than their peers.

This is in line with Paul’s experiences, as well. “When I brief ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ to an audience I get to a certain point, and I can see people in the audience looking to the left and  the right and going, oh you poor human bastards, and leaving themselves out of it! They’re like, Oh, you’ve got all these problems,” he said.

But education and awareness can significantly mitigate this tendency — which are crucial weapons for fighting disinformation attacks across the board:

 It has been proposed that decision making may be a teachable skill (Baron and Brown 1991, Bruine de Bruin et al. 2007, Fischhoff 1982, Larrick 2004), and correlational evidence has suggested that people who have received formal training in decision making may obtain better life outcomes (Larrick et al. 1993). If so, then the bias blind spot represents an obstacle to improving the quality of both work and life because it bolsters resistance to debiasing training aimed at improving decision-making ability. This influence is not irrevocable. We have found that propensity to exhibit bias blind spot can be reduced by as much as 39% in a related research program consisting of scenarios in which participants could exhibit bias blind spot and were then provided with critical feedback and training (Symborski et al. 2014).

Understanding the issues that disinformation and propaganda are able to seize onto and countering the specific outcomes they intend to bring about and educating others in simple, no-nonsense ways in advance and pointing out easily observable patterns (such as who is spreading what and what they have claimed in the past) rather than simply following along behind fact-checking every lie, can provide a “raincoat” or an “umbrella” to those at whom the spray or flood of lies is directed.

And make no mistake about it. This is not just a bunch of individual grifters shilling lies, although there are certainly those as well; this is organized hybrid warfare intended to bring about specific political outcomes:

Media analysis has demonstrated the significant consequences of mass usage of widespread, negative social political information campaigns. First, cyber aggression against key figures in government is expected to encourage the widening range of negative information streams in order to aggravate existing civil mistrust and anti-government behavior. When this is extended into social media, the spread of false and malicious information encourages beliefs and behavior that would normally be kept in check by existing social mores and civic expectations. Even if information does not create a conscious change in beliefs, it can impact the interpretation of future information by providing effective anchoring and priming media.[30] This can aid a domestic aggressor wishing to influence the course of the conflict in order to weaken support for the target government. In some cases, such information warfare can replace kinetic operations, undermining defensive campaigns before they even need to begin.

Cyber aggression often conceals its actors and motives, shrouded by technological methods that can mask their manipulative goals. The methods of concealment include anonymous claims to authority, news items manipulated with half-truths, repetition of messages, information overload, cyber-pseudo operations (government posing as insurgents), sock-puppeting (government agents playing the role of online commentators), and astro-turfing (creating of false grassroots movements).[31]

There are already strategies that are known to be highly effective against hybrid warfare techniques, but they require swift and responsive intervention:

The effective prevention and detection of enemy’s information and psychological actions in cyber space and our quick reaction require the creation of national centers of countermeasures to information and cyberattacks. The national centers should unite and facilitate coordination among international centers providing countermeasures to cyber threats. The national centers should provide monitoring and detection of destructive effects and identify signs, mechanisms (strategies, tactics, techniques, forms and methods) of their implementation. They should detect the sources and variants of spreading dangerous contents, interconnection during the operation (actions) among various Internet resources for defining the aim of the actions and possible results.

Measures for neutralization of destructive information and cyber effects and their sources are:

-Warning the owners (if they are known) of Internet resources about restrictions against spreading fake, untruthful information with the recommendation of its deletion if the information harms subjects and objects of national security (person, society, state)

-Creating public registries for unreliable/suspected resources.

In a perfect world, or even a slightly better one, institutions such as journalism would thus be empowered to stop the cycle before it began by short-circuiting the disinformation loop before it became part of the national (or international) conversation and then enshrined into national (or international) policy. The way to empower newsrooms is by restoring the funding that has been stripped from them by social media platforms, which can choke off access to information at will.

Governments would also understand and recognize the security threats carried by disinformation campaigns (one only needs to look at the disastrous effects that weaponized propaganda has had around the spread of COVID-19 in the United States and beyond, for one particularly glaring example) and move to counter them with appropriate information. Ideally, too, social media companies would recognize this very human tendency and move to counter it for the sake of national and global security, instead of allowing bad actors to exploit such blind spots for personal gain and profit.

But this is not yet an ideal world, nor even a slightly better one. However, that is where anyone public can fight back online with the right tools and bring about significant results — even against intense firehosing.

It starts with forming networks and communities to carry out actions against these attacks. “The moment you start to organize, there’s all kinds of things a collective could do to protect each other,” Paul said.

For example, forming “brigades” of trusted contacts to split the efforts of fact-checking is helpful; using those same organized “brigades” to mass report lies and propaganda as they makes their usual way from the fringes to the mainstream using social media networks as vehicles and publicly pressure platforms so that they have no choice but to act would be more helpful still.

Other options include educating friends within your networks in advance of anticipated disinformation campaigns and preserving a continuity of information, so that no one can rewrite the past. Befriend or follow anti-disinformation journalists and academics on social media, and above all, remember that weaponized disinformation and propaganda is always opportunistic and reflexive, which also means it can be pre-empted and disrupted with timely action. Bring in everyone you can and ruthlessly moderate within the networks that you create.

We cannot control who attacks us and how, but we can choose how we respond to this new, wild world of weaponized disinformation and propaganda. With just a few changes, we can form the habits and customs that we need in order to build resilience against what is already here, and whatever is still to come.

The post How to Fight Disinformation — Part I: Firehosing appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

active measures, analysis, Cambridge Analytica, disinformation, Facebook, google, hybrid warfare, propaganda, resilience, TruthOrFiction, twitter, youtube

How to Fight Disinformation: Introduction and Overview

This is the first of a series about how communities can fight back and protect themselves against weaponized disinformation.

In 2015 and 2016, new and paranoid strains of political ideology took social media discourse by storm. The details varied by community, but all versions were toxic brews of fear, terror, and lies borne on a torrent of algorithms with the goal of lowering public morale and straining or breaking social bonds.

The algorithmically-charged disinformation and upsetting discussions around it were so overwhelming that it was at first difficult for communities and countries to recognize that they were under attack. In fact, the speed and scale at which misinformation and disinformation spread, generating ripple effects in politics and policies, were unprecedented acts of hybrid warfare, which tends to focus on information rather than traditional “kinetic,” or physical, battle spaces.

This is a tactic heavily used by Russia’s military, and is therefore often analyzed as though it has only been used by them — but although the Kremlin has known expertise in such techniques, they are by no means limited to any one country or entity thanks to the fact that social media has made such techniques extremely simple and relatively cheap to scale, turning the online world into a state-sponsored or corporate-backed free-for-all:

Hybrid action is characterized by ambiguity as hybrid actors blur the usual borders of international politics and operate in the interfaces between external and internal, legal and illegal, and peace and war. The ambiguity is created by combining conventional and unconventional means – disinformation and interference in political debate or elections, critical infrastructure disturbances or attacks, cyber operations, different forms of criminal activities and, finally, an asymmetric use of military means and warfare.

By using the aforementioned unconventional and conventional means in concert, hybrid actors veil their action in vagueness and ambiguity, complicating attribution and response. The use of different intermediaries – or proxy actors – supports the achievement of these goals. Hybrid action is cost-effective as it turns the vulnerabilities of the target into a direct strength for the hybrid actor. This makes hybrid action more difficult to prevent or respond to.

In an online universe defined by targeted disinformation, we become the unwitting (and sometimes witting) instruments of our own offline destruction — from our individual, compartmentalized lives all the way to up to the international communities. Now, more than any other time in human history, we can see how interconnected we all are — when one tweet may mean the difference between life or death, or stories circulated to just the right people can trigger grotesque acts of ultraviolence.

This is an issue that for the moment is intractable. Our behavioral and personality profiles won’t be going anywhere; our identities have already been gathered, cultured, sliced, diced, manipulated, reassembled into simulacra of ourselves for “modeling” purposes, and sold to the highest bidders. It won’t be coming back.

This means that if you use social media, and sometimes even if you don’t, there are entities out there with imprints of your personalities, that by their own admission they are trying to use to predict and manipulate your behavior in ways that were previously invisible but which are now becoming more revealed by the moment — you have been checked, tested, and scored according to decisions you make every day, and those decisions are used to try to “nudge” you into specific choices using techniques such as “dark patterns,” or visual and emotional manipulation that is not immediately obvious as such:

Dark patterns show up all over the web, nudging people to subscribe to newsletters, add items to their carts, or sign up for services. But, says says Colin Gray, a human-computer interaction researcher at Purdue University, they’re particularly insidious “when you’re deciding what privacy rights to give away, what data you’re willing to part with.” Gray has been studying dark patterns since 2015. He and his research team have identified five basic types: nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference, and forced action. All of those show up in privacy controls. He and other researchers in the field have noticed the cognitive dissonance between Silicon Valley’s grand overtures toward privacy and the tools to modulate these choices, which remain filled with confusing language, manipulative design, and other features designed to leech more data.

Those privacy shell games aren’t limited to social media. They’ve become endemic to the web at large, especially in the wake of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. Since GDPR went into effect in 2018, websites have been required to ask people for consent to collect certain types of data. But some consent banners simply ask you to accept the privacy policies—with no option to say no. “Some research has suggested that upwards of 70 percent of consent banners in the EU have some kind of dark pattern embedded in them,” says Gray. “That’s problematic when you’re giving away substantial rights.”

This would be a matter of grave concern in any case, but because this technology has been developed opaquely and used against us without our knowledge or consent to bring about specific political goals, it threatens to usher in an age in which would-be authoritarian strongmen with the money and desire to subjugate can distract and upset entire populations long enough to seize power.

A few caveats are in order here. For one thing, this is a very blunt instrument. Social media, which has sold itself to corporations as a persuasion machine, does use sophisticated marketing techniques in order to sway personal decisions — but the tech world’s understanding of humanity is demonstrably so grossly oversimplified that instead of building a persuasion machine, it has built a permission mechanism that allows the worst among us to spread lies, corrosive rhetoric, and suffering, elevating their voices artificially above the rest using algorithms and misdirection.

This is also not intended to take the place of professional analysis nor help for individual psychological trauma. Rather, it is an attempt to distill the at-scale psychological effects of disinformation and propaganda into their corollaries at the individual level for better understanding of how it works — and how to deal with it. And while we are not qualified nor equipped to offer advice for psychological help, we can identify and compare these mechanisms.

And we can reverse-engineer these tactics. Cultivating radical compassion is one way to counteract the confusion and frustration from the emotional and psychological attacks that are part and parcel of hybrid threats. Reach out to your neighbors, establish mutual aid networks, be kind to one another, but do not tolerate intolerance in your networks and do not be afraid to take time to establish boundaries.

These strategies are part of what has come to be called building resilience, or forming a cultural immune system against disinformation toxicity. Building up institutions — particularly journalism — is essential, but the fight begins at the individual level, which effectively democratizes the response to warfare and threats. In other words, everyone who wants to can fight back:

Building societal resilience is the only assured way of keeping at least some of the home-​field advantage because the aggressor will try to build-​up and utilise the effect of surprise. This, however, is not an easy task. It requires a long term plan and dedication to implementation.

First, a strong political mandate and security concept need to be in place. Second, planning, awareness building, and education are needed. Third, the key stakeholders in various parts of the society must share a common situational awareness, threat and risk assessment, and planning and training processes.

Building a more resilient society should not be viewed only as an extra burden for already economically struggling Western societies; it is also a great opportunity. The structures that allow a society to respond in an agile manner to hybrid threats also support better understanding and coping with the complex underlying interrelations that make our modern societies fragile. These defensive structures also help to make our societies more functional, as decision-​making processes become more transparent and inclusive.

In this series, we will discuss the different forms of resilience and offer suggestions and solutions for dealing with information warfare and hybrid threats in your everyday life.

The post How to Fight Disinformation: Introduction and Overview appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

2020 election, active measures, analysis, disinformation, hybrid threats, hybrid warfare, proactive measures, reporting, russia, social media, Terrorism, trump, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, War

Trump’s Disinformation Spree After Losing Election Propelled by Social Media

In the days after a resounding popular vote loss to former United States Vice President Joe Biden, sitting president Donald Trump advanced numerous conspiracy theories before beginning to deny the results of the election outright.

The first set of conspiracy theories revolved around purported unforeseen delays in the vote counts, which stemmed from the Republican Party’s sustained attacks on voting by mail — effectively ensuring that far more Republicans voted in person on the day of the election, but that Democratic Party voters’ ballots trickled in over days amid a surge of early voting galvanized by pandemic concerns, as detailed in this November 4 2020 story from PolitiFact:

Some states in which Trump was leading overnight on Nov. 3 experienced delays in the ballot-counting process due to an influx of mail-in ballots, spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and preferred by Democratic voters. There is no evidence that states are deliberately stalling vote tabulation.

In three states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which have Democratic governors — election officials were not allowed to start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day or just before. That resulted in reporting delays overnight on Nov. 3, since mail ballots take more time to count than in-person votes.

Similar, related rumors were equally baseless, as was the next cluster of conspiracy theories about “millions” of votes being “switched” from Trump to Biden — all of which were quickly refuted in a statement from election officials:

The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.

When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.

While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.

These claims were bolstered by anonymous claims on pro-Trump message boards, propaganda and disinformation purveyors such as One America News Network, and of course baseless accusations from Trump himself, echoed by his proxies:

Finally, as these rumors coagulated into accusations, which in turn were incorporated into legal challenges that failed to stand up to any type of scrutiny, Trump simply began to claim outright that — despite the reality of the results — he was actually the winner of the 2020 presidential election. These tweets were quickly labeled with an extraordinarily hesitant disclaimer (“Multiple sources called this election differently”):

Not one of these claims has any validity. However, taken in their aggregate, another motive for them appears to emerge. These rumors do not appear to be  to install Trump as winner of the 2020 presidential election, nor (as some politicians have claimed) to let him get the disappointment and anger at losing out of his system, but perhaps a darker and more serious motive still — to permanently mar or destroy Americans’ faith in its democratic institutions.

This is a known goal of hybrid threats, a component of asymmetric warfare preferred by state — and increasingly, non-state — actors who either lack or who are unwilling to use military might or other physical threats, as the National Defense University’s publication PRISM explains in a 2019 article:

While these interpretations differ somewhat in content, what they have common is less to do with Hoffman’s hybrid warfare and more to do with Sun Tzu’s ancient wisdom that “to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” They all essentially describe nonviolent revisionist grand strategy in contemporary international politics. They describe the use of multiple, ambiguous means to target vulnerabilities across society to achieve goals gradually without triggering decisive responses. As Michael Mazarr has stated, “Unwilling to risk major escalation with outright military adventurism, these [revisionist] actors are employing sequences of gradual steps to secure strategic leverage. The efforts remain below thresholds that would generate a powerful U.S. or international response, but nonetheless are forceful and deliberate, calculated to gain measurable traction over time.”

The final goal of such sustained efforts is to destroy faith in institutions, thereby destroying entire countries from within by creating an environment in which the fundamental trust between individuals and governments necessary for social cohesion in liberal democracies can no longer exist. From this perspective, these ongoing denials of the reality of the election’s results can be viewed not simply as one man lashing out in denial as enablers look on, but an ongoing act of aggression against the American people and their long-cherished democratic systems, using social media platforms and their algorithms as both vehicles and enthusiastic enablers for disinformation campaigns.

Whatever their motivations, the way to counteract these threats remains the same. Hybrid threats can be countered by building resilience — in other words, creating and strengthening national (and international) responses to disinformation campaigns and attacks from the ground up with a combination of vetted, credible, transparent actions by institutions, strong and independent journalism unfettered by government censorship or political intimidation, and an overall refusal by individuals and entire institutions to cave to lies uttered by bad-faith bullies. Without resilience and clarity, there is no democracy at all.

The post Trump’s Disinformation Spree After Losing Election Propelled by Social Media appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

2020 election, active measures, analysis, disinformation, hybrid warfare, proactive measures, reporting, russia, social media, Terrorism, trump, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, War

Trump’s Disinformation Spree After Losing Election Propelled by Social Media

In the days after a resounding popular vote loss to former United States Vice President Joe Biden, sitting president Donald Trump advanced numerous conspiracy theories before beginning to deny the results of the election outright.

The first set of conspiracy theories revolved around purported unforeseen delays in the vote counts, which stemmed from the Republican Party’s sustained attacks on voting by mail — effectively ensuring that far more Republicans voted in person on the day of the election, but that Democratic Party voters’ ballots trickled in over days amid a surge of early voting galvanized by pandemic concerns, as detailed in this November 4 2020 story from PolitiFact:

Some states in which Trump was leading overnight on Nov. 3 experienced delays in the ballot-counting process due to an influx of mail-in ballots, spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and preferred by Democratic voters. There is no evidence that states are deliberately stalling vote tabulation.

In three states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which have Democratic governors — election officials were not allowed to start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day or just before. That resulted in reporting delays overnight on Nov. 3, since mail ballots take more time to count than in-person votes.

Similar, related rumors were equally baseless, as was the next cluster of conspiracy theories about “millions” of votes being “switched” from Trump to Biden — all of which were quickly refuted in a statement from election officials:

The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.

When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.

While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.

These claims were bolstered by anonymous claims on pro-Trump message boards, propaganda and disinformation purveyors such as One America News Network, and of course baseless accusations from Trump himself, echoed by his proxies:

Finally, as these rumors coagulated into accusations, which in turn were incorporated into legal challenges that failed to stand up to any type of scrutiny, Trump simply began to claim outright that — despite the reality of the results — he was actually the winner of the 2020 presidential election. These tweets were quickly labeled with an extraordinarily hesitant disclaimer (“Multiple sources called this election differently”):

Not one of these claims has any validity. However, taken in their aggregate, another motive for them appears to emerge. These rumors do not appear to be  to install Trump as winner of the 2020 presidential election, nor (as some politicians have claimed) to let him get the disappointment and anger at losing out of his system, but perhaps a darker and more serious motive still — to permanently mar or destroy Americans’ faith in its democratic institutions.

This is a known goal of hybrid threats, a component of asymmetric warfare preferred by state — and increasingly, non-state — actors who either lack or who are unwilling to use military might or other physical threats, as the National Defense University’s publication PRISM explains in a 2019 article:

While these interpretations differ somewhat in content, what they have common is less to do with Hoffman’s hybrid warfare and more to do with Sun Tzu’s ancient wisdom that “to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” They all essentially describe nonviolent revisionist grand strategy in contemporary international politics. They describe the use of multiple, ambiguous means to target vulnerabilities across society to achieve goals gradually without triggering decisive responses. As Michael Mazarr has stated, “Unwilling to risk major escalation with outright military adventurism, these [revisionist] actors are employing sequences of gradual steps to secure strategic leverage. The efforts remain below thresholds that would generate a powerful U.S. or international response, but nonetheless are forceful and deliberate, calculated to gain measurable traction over time.”

The final goal of such sustained efforts is to destroy faith in institutions, thereby destroying entire countries from within by creating an environment in which the fundamental trust between individuals and governments necessary for social cohesion in liberal democracies can no longer exist. From this perspective, these ongoing denials of the reality of the election’s results can be viewed not simply as one man lashing out in denial as enablers look on, but an ongoing act of aggression against the American people and their long-cherished democratic systems, using social media platforms and their algorithms as both vehicles and enthusiastic enablers for disinformation campaigns.

Whatever their motivations, the way to counteract these threats remains the same. Hybrid threats can be countered by building resilience — in other words, creating and strengthening national (and international) responses to disinformation campaigns and attacks from the ground up with a combination of vetted, credible, transparent actions by institutions, strong and independent journalism unfettered by government censorship or political intimidation, and an overall refusal by individuals and entire institutions to cave to lies uttered by bad-faith bullies. Without resilience and clarity, there is no democracy at all.

The post Trump’s Disinformation Spree After Losing Election Propelled by Social Media appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

2020 election, analysis, anti mask, antivaxxers, boogaloo, boogaloo bois, covid-19, Crime / Police, disinformation, Facebook, gab, Identifying Fake News, mewe, news media, reporting, russia, social media, stochastic terror, stochastic violence, Terrorism, trump, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, twitter, Viruses, War, Warnings, washington dc, white supremacists

As U.S. Election Looms, Agitprop Floods Social Media Platforms

In the days leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the disinformation that has been a hallmark of the Trump campaign, then administration, then campaign again reached new heights with political smears, Soviet-style weaponized conspiracy theories, and their inevitable fruits borne out as stochastic acts of terror, often — but not always — targeting specific politicians or protesters.

Agitprop is propaganda meant to inflame or agitate the public at large, hence the portmanteau. It has been a characteristic of the disinformation that has swept social media platforms, but is reaching new levels (including overt calls for violence) in the final days before the November 3 2020 election.

As the corrosive claims propaganda purveyors and well-known sites make continue to be faithfully debunked by increasingly exhausted and slimed fact-checkers, debunkers, and other journalists, a new disinformation narrative has emerged. This is characterized by the discussion of a new civil war not just as a possibility but an inevitability, ascribed to a shadowy and nebulous “global Left” or the pejorative “Democrat Party.” They appear on Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter, Telegram, Gab, MeWe, and other, more esoteric social media sites.

Many are in the forms of commentary, but others are calls to action.

"Get ready people, intell came in last night. Many funded groups being assembled right now overly prepared to create a mass civil unrest. You all need to have at least a month of essentials.."
Post from The III% Organization calling for a response to “mass civil unrest.”

Some are nebulous, without specific individual or geographic targets as they use their propaganda to prey on fear or faith or both:

"Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be though envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like grass, and wither as the green herb."
“Bible Study” post calling for violent responses to protests by “antifa, blm, communists, etc.”

Others are targeting specific regions that have seen major unrest or disturbances, or swing states whose governors have policies perceived as counter to the Trump administration’s:

"45 out of 50 U.S. governors did not force COVID-19 infected patients into nursing homes. BUT 5 OF THEM DID. That is nearly 40% of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States. THAT'S NOT AN ACCIDENT, THAT'S PREMEDITATED MURDER!"
Propaganda meme targeting governors of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, and Michigan.

There are also warnings of an event set to take place on election night in Washington, DC. Typically, these rumors come in the form of either mischaracterizing planned peaceful protests, or simply making up events to justify calls to action to “defend” the area from a “leftist uprising” or “antifa thugs.” The rumors seem to have emerged out of reports of a planned peaceful protest that have been spun up into rumors of plans to “shut down the country,” as disinformation-heavy far-right site The Federalist put it:

October 20 2020 story from The Federalist with a social media headline reading, falsely, “Resistance Plans To Shut Down The Country If Biden Doesn’t Win.”

The text of the article (as well as the headline once you click the story) does not match this inflammatory claim, meaning that The Federalist and other sites like it are banking on people sharing it based on the headline:

Riot and protest instigators plan to “make sure Trump leaves the White House” by any means necessary after the Nov. 3 election, according to website posts from the group Shut Down DC and their allies. “W]e’re making plans to be in the streets before the polls even close, ready to adapt and respond to whatever comes our way,” the group says on its website currently.

“Trump has shown that he will stop at nothing to maintain his grip on power. Trump will not leave office without mass mobilization and direct action,” an Oct. 13 version of the same web page reads, according to Internet Archive records.

The group linked to protests at the homes of Trump administration officials tells its DC-area supporters to “Come to Black Lives Matter Plaza” on election night “to create serious disruption if Trump really tries to steal the election!” Black Lives Matter Plaza is the site of repeated anti-Trump summer rioting and defacement of the historic Saint John’s Church one block away from the White House.

None of these statements — from claims about the governors to rumors of a left-wing uprising — have much basis in objective reality, but as an October 2020 report on militia activities in the United States from MilitiaWatch and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project explains, reality is not the point:

….[L]ocations that have seen substantial engagement in anti-coronavirus lockdown protests are at heightened risk. This stems from the direct link between state authority and the imposition of such restrictions, which challenges the ideals of many of the groups introduced above. These protests also serve as crucial network-building events for right-wing activists to re-activate for other protests and counter-demonstrations.

Also at risk are places where militias might have perceptions of ‘leftist coup’ activities. While ‘leftist coup’ activities are poorly defined among armed movements, they can be understood as fear of organized left-wing activism against right-wing activity. Protests organized by and around BLM, or places where anti-BLM activists may fear Antifa activity, are also at a heightened risk of militia activity. Leaders of militias often refer to BLM activists as “Marxists” (The Atlantic, November 2020). It is important to note that the ‘leftist coup’ phenomenon is not founded in any real detectable dynamics, and appears to rather be related more to endemic paranoia among many of the armed militias of the US.

The report also identifies what its data shows to be the regions in the United States most at risk of election violence and chaos:

State capitals and ‘periphery’ towns also remain important potential inflection points for violence, as they provide a natural coalescence point, especially in more rural and suburban areas that have been particularly conducive to the foundation and regular activities of militia groups. Medium-population cities and suburban areas with centralized zones — such as parks, main streets, and plazas — also serve as locations of major gravitational pull. These locations are potentially fertile grounds for violence from the groups identified in this report. This is especially true in contexts where groups are able to draw from a large population outside of the primary location, and in places that can be easily accessed from these hinterland and suburban regions.

Barriers to militia activity, meanwhile, can include locations with an overwhelming left-leaning population and/or large populations unsupportive of militias. Within these parameters, a location like Albany, New York would be more likely to see violence related to the right-wing armed movements we have identified, while New York City would remain less likely.

Taking these drivers and barriers into account, capitals and peripheral towns, as well as  medium-population cities and suburban areas with centralized zones, in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon are deemed to be at highest risk of increased militia activity in the election and post-election period. Meanwhile, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, California, and New Mexico are found to be at moderate risk.

This agitprop and corrosive rhetoric is also being laundered and herded further into the national discourse from the fringe by the usual mechanisms of mainstream-adjacent media members who support the far right and its activities. In the past seven days, for example, propagandists, grifters, and other trolls have reached a new level of keening about a second civil war or coup d’etat:

 

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. warning about a “coup d’etat.”
YouTuber Tim Pool says a Silicon Valley CEO has sent out a mass email warning that there will be a civil war if Trump wins.
“Independent Christian news analyst” Lisa Haven claiming that “globalist leaders” are threatening that “you’ll own nothing” and “America will fall.”

But the concept of what war, internecine or otherwise, actually looks like has changed and hybridized in the last few years. Thanks to active measures, it is now horizontal, targeting civilians rather than soldiers and individual minds and hearts rather than groups of people; propaganda and hacking have taken the place of bombs for the most part, and hybrid warfare turns on terror against soft targets rather than battles between trained armies.

A theory known as the “Three Block War,” first predicted by United States Marine Corps Gen. Charles C. Krulak in the 1990s, explains some of these changes:

The rapid diffusion of technology, the growth of a multitude of transnational factors, and the consequences of increasing globalization and economic interdependence, have coalesced to create national security challenges remarkable for their complexity. By 2020, eighty-five percent of the world’s inhabitants will be crowded into coastal cities — cities generally lacking the infrastructure required to support their burgeoning populations. Under these conditions, long simmering ethnic, nationalist, and economic tensions will explode and increase the potential of crises requiring U.S. intervention. Compounding the challenges posed by this growing global instability will be the emergence of an increasingly complex and lethal battlefield. The widespread availability of sophisticated weapons and equipment will “level the playing field” and negate our traditional technological superiority. The lines separating the levels of war, and distinguishing combatant from “non-combatant,” will blur, and adversaries, confounded by our “conventional” superiority, will resort to asymmetrical means to redress the imbalance. Further complicating the situation will be the ubiquitous media whose presence will mean that all future conflicts will be acted out before an international audience.

Kulak’s predictions did not take social media and livestreaming into account as a possibility, which has offered the opportunity for still more coverage from areas of unrest and acts of extreme violence — which in turn naturally play into further fearmongering and disinformation, which can now appear in real time and at a global scale, thanks to social media algorithms and the work of bots, trolls, and overenthusiastic useful idiots.

In 2005, two senior U.S. military officials, retired Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman and then-Lt. Gen. James Mattis (who went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration before resigning in protest of its policies in December 2018) accurately predicted the toxicity of social media and its role in such influence campaigns is that it was   updated this theory to what they called a Four Block War, acknowledging the heavy disinformation and agitprop component in such skirmishes and advising ways to counter it through information operations:

 [The Three Block War] is a pretty simple construct. You are fighting like the dickens on one block, you’re handing our humanitarian supplies in the next block, and the next one over you’re trying to keep warring factions apart. This environment should sound pretty familiar to anyone watching CNN these days. It is not an environment for specialists, who may find themselves in the middle of a firefight that they were not prepared for.

[…]

The Four Block War adds a new but very relevant dimension to situations like the counterinsurgency in Iraq. Insurgencies are wars of ideas, and our ideas need to compete with those of the enemy. Our actions in the three other blocks are important to building up our credibility and establishing relationships with the population and their leadership. Thus, there is an information operations aspect within each block. In each of the traditional three blocks our Marines are both “sensors” that collect intelligence, as well as “transmitters.” Everything they do or fail to do sends a message. They need to be trained for that, and informed by commander’s intent.

The information ops component is how we extend our reach and how we can influence populations to reject the misshaped ideology and hatred they are offered by the insurgents. Successful information ops help the civilian population understand and accept the better future we seek to help build with them.

Seen through that lens, the ongoing tensions and violence between protesters, white supremacists and their supporters, and local and federal law enforcement that has been ongoing for months in Portland, Oregon takes on a new dimension, because by this metric, that war is already here as its combatants battle for control of a major port city in the western United States — complete with exhaustive traditional and social media coverage:

As Portland-area far-right researcher and journalist Robert Evans points out, the unrest there is a reliable bellwether for what can be expected throughout the country on election day and beyond if the American public does not take a stand against it, meaning much of the country might soon expect small but fierce battle zones, all with that same violence relayed to the rest of the world in real time:

If November 4 brings mass protests across the country, staying home won’t necessarily protect you. A single can of tear gas can spread a full quarter mile. Portlanders are regularly tear-gassed by police in their own homes. One man who fled his home to escape a choking cloud of gas was beaten so badly by a Portland police officer that he received a concussion. One of the most haunting recordings of the entire year is this mother begging to the police, “Our babies sleep here, they don’t have masks.”

Given the instability of the American political situation (largely due to weaponized disinformation and rhetoric and the politicians who encourage it to further their own aims), large-scale stochastic violence, a full-blown civil war, or even a number of Portland, Oregon scenarios should be anticipated — but they are not assured outcomes. Awareness that such rhetoric and mobilization has been taking place is key in keeping the situation on the ground from devolving into further violence.

As we have written about extensively in the past, we maintain that curbing the flow of disinformation into the public discourse from all fronts, whether through academia, journalism, activism, or simply moderating misleading and corrosive content, remains the most reliable and nonviolent way of countering such activities.  The good news is that in this brave new world of social media and internet organization, anyone who wishes can participate to counter agitprop and lies. The bad news is that in this brave new world of social media and internet organization, without sustained public efforts to fight propaganda and disinformation, no one will be untouched by its corrosive effects for the foreseeable future.

The post As U.S. Election Looms, Agitprop Floods Social Media Platforms appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

alaska, analysis, arizona, disinformation, estonia, florida, inauthentic activity, pennsylvania, Proud Boys, reporting, saudi araba, social media, trump, TruthOrFiction, voter intimidation, War

Threatening Messages Sent to Democratic Party Voters in Battleground States

In a preview of more organized disinformation campaigns to come in the 2020 U.S. elections and subsequent interregnum period, Democratic Party voters in swing states received threatening emails the week of October 19 2020, ordering them to switch their voter registration to Republican or to expect consequences.

The first reports of such emails appeared out of Florida. The text of the emails themselves — which were from spoofed email addresses purporting to be from the far-right group the Proud Boys — generally read as follows:

(NAME) we are in possession of all your information You are currently registered as a Democrat and we know this because we have gained access into the entire voting infrastructure. You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply. We will know which candidate you voted for. I would take this seriously if I were you. (VOTER’S ADDRESS) good luck

Officials in Florida’s Brevard County, which was among the first regions to report these emails, swiftly responded to the stories by assuring voters that they and their ballots were secure. Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said in a statement that the threats were illegitimate and should be considered an act of attempted intimidation:

While the investigation is active and currently ongoing, as your Sheriff I want to personally assure everyone that the Sheriff’s Office, our federal and local law enforcement partners are doing everything possible to identify those responsible. In America, every registered voter is afforded the right to participate in the electoral process and deserves to do so without intimidation or influence. Please know that everyone in our community is safe to go to the polls throughout the election process and while these emails appear concerning, the investigation to date has determined the emails originated from outside the continental United States and are not considered a valid threat, but were sent with a morally corrupt agenda!

Please do not allow this or any other action by anyone to intimidate or dissuade you from your right as an American to cast your ballot for the candidate(s) of your choosing during early voting or on Election Day!!

Soon after that, voters in Alaska began to report receiving the same emails, which once again purported to be from the Proud Boys:

An Anchorage-based FBI spokeswoman, Chloe Martin, said her agency is also aware of the emails but declined to answer questions. She cited a statement released by the Anchorage FBI office earlier this month saying that the agency is monitoring potential threats to Americans’ voting rights and that violations of federal law in Alaska will not be tolerated.

The emails were sent from multiple addresses, according to copies shared with Alaska Public Media and posted to social media. One was sent from “trumpdigitalsoldier11@hotmail.com,” and the one sent to Stanton came from “info@officialproudboys.com.”

Reports also appeared of voters receiving the same emails in at least two other battleground states so far, Arizona and Pennsylvania.  (Alaska is not technically a swing state in the 2020 election, but its state politics are in play nationally.)

Chris Krebs of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency weighed in on the issue:

Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio vehemently denied that the group was part of any such attempt. “It’s just never been a thing,” he told reporters:

The chairman of Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio of Miami, said his group did not send the emails. He made the remarks in an interview with Fresh Take Florida, a news service operated by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Tarrio said he was cooperating with the FBI’s investigation.

“We don’t do mass emails,” Tarrio said. “This is definitely, definitely not us.”

Tarrio also said the Proud Boys had no history of being involved in voter intimidation.

CBS further reported that the messages are tied to servers located not in the United State, but Estonia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — although what that may mean remains unclear:

The IP addresses don’t establish that the senders are based in those countries, since the messages could have been routed through the servers from nearly anywhere, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and former chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. He noted that the messages were sent via a “cloud infrastructure provider in Saudi Arabia called ‘Saudi Executive Cloud.'”

Alperovitch, who reviewed the source code from one of the emails, said that while the emails were sent through overseas servers, “there is no indication to suggest that it is a nation-state or otherwise foreign campaign.”

“These types of email campaigns are unfortunately trivial to execute for anyone with an internet connection and a just modicum of technical ability,” he said.

Officials in each state say that the investigations are continuing and encourage voters who receive such emails (or who experience similarly organized intimidation attempts online or offline) to report them to local authorities.

It is the latest salvo in an ongoing battle, as disinformation purveyors continue their inauthentic tactics, aided and abetted by social media algorithms, hoaxsters, gadflies, hostile domestic and foreign entities, useful idiots, weaponized rhetoric, and actual violence on levels from hyperlocal to national to global, all in pursuit of the same goal: To create chaos and sow doubts around the outcome of the 2020 U.S. election — whatever that might be — and to topple the public’s already teetering faith in liberal democracies and the institutions that support them.

The post Threatening Messages Sent to Democratic Party Voters in Battleground States appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, burisma holdings, disinformation, donald trump, elections 2020, Government, hunter biden, joe biden, news media, reporting, rudy giuliani, russia, social media, trump, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, ukraine

The Saga of Hunter Biden’s Laptop

On October 14 2020, as increasingly bold or desperate attempts from all corners to sway the November 2020 U.S. elections reached a fever pitch, a story appeared in the New York Post about Hunter Biden, son of Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden, promising in the headline to deliver a “smoking gun“:

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to e-mails obtained by The Post.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

From its very start, the story hedges its bets and is far from being the “smoking gun” or the “blockbuster” that it calls itself. Reading on, its “evidence” seems flimsier still. For one thing, all this evidence hinges on the fact that Hunter Biden sat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas producer, from 2014 to 2019. This is true. It is further true that his appointment to the board met with opposition by some with concerns that it would create an appearance, if not a reality, of conflict of interest.

And finally, it is true that the Trump administration began to level these charges at Hunter Biden, and by extension his father Joe Biden, in the months before Democratic lawmakers initiated impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump in September 2019 over Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

Four months before that, Trump’s lawyer — former New York City mayor turned enthusiastic disinformation purveyor Rudy Giuliani — announced that he would be traveling to Ukraine to attempt to pressure its incoming leadership to offer up dirt for political purposes:

Mr. Giuliani said he plans to travel to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in the coming days and wants to meet with the nation’s president-elect to urge him to pursue inquiries that allies of the White House contend could yield new information about two matters of intense interest to Mr. Trump.

One is the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The other is the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.

Mr. Giuliani’s plans create the remarkable scene of a lawyer for the president of the United States pressing a foreign government to pursue investigations that Mr. Trump’s allies hope could help him in his re-election campaign. And it comes after Mr. Trump spent more than half of his term facing questions about whether his 2016 campaign conspired with a foreign power.

Giuliani’s “investigations” ultimately would not bear fruit (the probe into the origins of at least one aspect of the Russia investigation was quietly shelved in October 2020, just days before the New York Post published the Hunter Biden “smoking gun” story)  but that didn’t stop the Trump re-election campaign and its political allies (including U.S. President Donald Trump himself) from trying to push the story along anyway, as Associated Press reported on October 13 2020:

Officials declassified the names of Obama administration officials who had requested the “unmasking” of an American — in this case, former national security adviser Michael Flynn — who surveillance revealed had interacted with Russia’s ambassador, but who wasn’t identified by name in intelligence reports. While Trump cast the unmasking as sinister, it’s a routine action and proper procedures were followed.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that a probe commissioned by Barr and focused on the “unmasking” question had concluded without criminal charges or any findings of substantive wrongdoing.

[…]

Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr has appointed a prosecutor to investigate the origins of the Russia probe. That prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut, has secured a guilty plea from a former FBI lawyer for altering an email related to Page’s surveillance.

Trump has demanded big-name indictments and called for the probe to be completed by Election Day. But it’s not clear when Durham will finish his work or what it will reveal.

The investigation into Hunter Biden’s time on the Burisma board, spearheaded by top Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, also fizzled away — but not until long after it was credibly described by Democratic lawmakers as a foreign influence attempt using the two as proxies in July 2020, which they denied:

The packets, the sources said, were sent by Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker who met with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Kyiv last December to discuss investigating the Biden family.

In a statement to POLITICO, Derkach said he sent the materials to the lawmakers and Mulvaney with the goal of “creating an inter-parliamentary association called ‘Friends of Ukraine STOP Corruption.’” He added that he recently notified Grassley, Johnson, Graham, and Democratic Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon “about the content and materials published and voiced” at his news conferences.

Spokespeople for Peters and Wyden said their offices had never received anything from Derkach.

Derkach was sanctioned by the United States Treasury two months later, in September 2020, for “election interference.” The press release from the Treasury was remarkably specific in its details:

From at least late 2019 through mid-2020, Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day. Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.

Between May and July 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials, and he levied unsubstantiated allegations against U.S. and international political figures. Derkach almost certainly targeted the U.S. voting populace, prominent U.S. persons, and members of the U.S. government, based on his reliance on U.S. platforms, English-language documents and videos, and pro-Russian lobbyists in the United States used to propagate his claims.

When Republicans produced their 87-page report on Biden’s purported activities in September, journalists and researchers pored over it, only to find that it was essentially a hash of warmed-over, discredited conspiracy theories and information already publicly available. As BuzzFeed News reported, that investigation ended not with a bang, but rather with more of a whimper:

The report relies heavily on the public remarks of two US officials, including top State Department official George Kent, who said Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma was “very awkward” for US officials who were pushing an anti-corruption agenda in post-revolution Ukraine.

Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, have been accused by Ukrainian authorities of corruption and are embroiled in investigations in Kyiv. But two of Ukraine’s last three prosecutors general — including Yuriy Lutsenko, who played a role in Rudy Giuliani’s backdoor Ukraine campaign to help Donald Trump — have said that no evidence has ever been found to suggest Hunter Biden was part of any corrupt scheme.

[…]

Beyond stating that Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, interfered with “efficient execution” US–Ukraine policy, there is nothing damning enough to throw Joe Biden’s candidacy off course.

The Johnson–Grassley report concludes that “Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board was problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” It also alleges that Hunter and other Biden relatives “cashed in on Joe Biden’s vice presidency.”

But the report undermines its own findings, stating that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected US policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”

The issue seemed to be a non-starter, until about three weeks later — October 14 2020 — when the New York Post dropped that aforementioned article (“Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad”), which reported the following:

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the e-mail reads.

An earlier e-mail from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

However, as journalists quickly noted, there was no smoking gun. In fact, there wasn’t even a gun to smoke. The story hinged on files found on a laptop that was dropped off at a Delaware computer store by an unknown person in April 2019; the owner of the shop, John Paul Isaac, told reporters after the New York Post story came out that he did not see the person who took in the laptop, but that it had a sticker on it that said “Beau Biden,” which is how he surmised that it was Hunter Biden’s computer.

It didn’t get any better from there:

Throughout the entire interview, Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that reached out to him. At one point, Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop. At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for “help accessing his drive.”

Isaac referenced the infamous Seth Rich conspiracy theory—which holds that a DNC staffer who police say was murdered in a botched robbery was actually killed off by Clinton allies because he leaked committee emails—as reason for his paranoia. He said he made a copy of the hard drive for purposes of personal protection.

Isaac then refused to answer questions about whether he had any sort of history with Rudy Giuliani:

 Pressed on his relationship with Giuliani, he replied: “When you’re afraid and you don’t know anything about the depth of the waters that you’re in, you want to find a lifeguard.”

Seeming to realize he’d said too much, he added: “Ah shit.”

So, Rudy was your lifeguard, the reporters asked. “No comment,” he replied.

It remains unclear whose laptop this actually was, how it came to be dropped off at the Maryland computer store in April 2019, whether the emails and other materials found on it are indeed legitimate, or whether more “October Surprises” will follow. However, one thing is clear: The New York Post “smoking gun” story — packed to the brim as it is with half-truths, outright lies, innuendo, smears, and foreign actors credibly accused of U.S. election meddling — is disinformation. Whether or not it will be credibly weaponized remains to be seen.

The post The Saga of Hunter Biden’s Laptop appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

covid-19, disinformation, donald trump, Fact Checks, fake tweets, Politics, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, twitter, viral content

‘My Blood IS the Vaccine’ Tweet

On October 9 2020, as speculation mounted about United States President Donald Trump’s health following his COVID-19 diagnosis, a purported tweet circulated in screenshot form:

Image

The alleged tweet, which was dated October 5 2020, said simply, “My blood IS the vaccine!!!!!”

The fact that there only appeared to be one version of the screenshot available raised our suspicions, so we first searched Trump’s Twitter timelines at @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS, where we turned up nothing:

We also noticed a curious lack of online detritus referring to this tweet, despite the fact that Trump’s tweets typically attract replies and retweets within seconds of being posted; instead, we saw many references to the same screengrab, which is generally a tell that a statement from a high-profile public personality has been fabricated:

The absence of detritus such as replies or quote tweets appeared to be definitive proof that there was no such tweet. However, we had one more trick to try; the investigative journalists over at ProPublica have maintained a database of Trump’s (and other politicians’) deleted tweets on a page called Politwoops for several years. It showed that while there were tweets that he deleted on October 5 2020, this was not among them:

Ditto for the Trump Twitter Archive from October 5 2020:

The absence of references and replies, the lack of presence in the database of deleted tweets, and the fact that there was only one screengrab of the tweet that we were able to find gave us enough proof to definitively say that this — in a week characterized by increasingly bizarre statements, appearances, and actions from the president, the people around him, and politicians associated with him — was not real, and was instead created by one of the myriad “prank” sites that exist specifically to fabricate tweets.

The post ‘My Blood IS the Vaccine’ Tweet appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

canada, Fact Checks, leathermen, lgbtq, Politics, Proud Boys, trump administration, TruthOrFiction, viral content

Did the Proud Boys Rebrand as the Leather Men Following a Hashtag Offensive?

In early October 2020, the far-right Proud Boys — who already regularly made national news in the United States for their violent rhetoric, hostility toward human rights protesters, and open support of President Donald Trump — were whipped into a frenzy after Trump himself mentioned them by name during the September 29 2020 presidential debate, advising them to “stand back” and “stand by“:

On the Proud Boys’ account on the social media app Telegram, the group appeared to take the statement as marching orders.

“Standing down and standing by sir,” the account wrote. The account then posted two videos of the answer, including one with the caption “God. Family. Brotherhood,” in which a man howled at the TV in response to Trump’s response.
[…]
The Proud Boys, a self-described “Western chauvinist” organization, is considered a violent, nationalistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and misogynistic hate group, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization that tracks extremist groups. Proud Boys members marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and have organized against Black Lives Matter protests in recent months.

After that, Twitter’s #ProudBoys hashtag was quickly taken over by images celebrating same-sex relationships:

It started after a callout from actor George Takei last week, who suggested on social media that gay men add the hashtag #proudboys to photos of themselves celebrating the LGBTQ community.

Proud Boys has been associated with violence and the far-right movement. The U.S.-based Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) describes the all-male organization as a hate group.

The Proud Boys, founded in 2016 by Canadian Gavin McInnes, was recently in the spotlight after U.S. President Donald Trump was asked to condemn white supremacist and militia groups during last week’s presidential debate.

This was followed by a pervasive rumor that the Proud Boys had rebranded to the “Leather Men” as a result, which was met with gleeful commentary of its own (leathermen are a subculture of the LGBTQ community perhaps best known for, yes, wearing leather):

However, this is not true. That rumor originated from Canadian site The Beaverton, which published a story on October 5 2020 (“As Gay Twitter reclaims #ProudBoys hashtag, Proud Boys change name to ‘Leather Men'”) that evidently caught social media’s eye:

While members of the far right gang were admittedly sad to lose their iconic Fred Perry polo shirts and Proud Boys name, many seem optimistic about the new Leather Men branding. “Just imagine how cool it’ll look when a bunch of us dudes show up to a bar together all wearing badass leather,” exclaimed Marcus Smith, Proud Boys member and Orange Julius assistant manager.

“Some of the guys are even gonna take it a step further, and wear leather caps, or even go extra-tough and wear those cool leather harnesses they sell in specialty stores. No one’ll ever make fun of us again!”

Given the former Proud Boys focus on Men’s Rights, several members plan to use their group’s new branding to advocate for divorced men not having to pay alimony, posting under the hashtag #LeatherDaddies.

At press time the Leather Men (formerly Proud Boys) organization is reporting record applications for membership, mostly through Grindr.

Later that week, the site doubled down on Twitter:

But actually, The Beaverton had, as they make clear on the site’s disclaimer:

The Beaverton is a news satire and parody publication. All articles contained within this website and on its social media accounts, however similar to real events, are fictitious. When public figures or actual businesses are mentioned by name, the corresponding story details are invented. In all other cases, any resemblance to actual persons, businesses or events is entirely coincidental.

Images on the The Beaverton website may consist of original photos, commissioned artwork, stock photography and creative commons photos. We have done our best to attribute the creators of such photos and artwork based on the information available to us. Use of these works does not suggests that the respective authors endorse us or our use of the work.

Naturally, the article was quickly decoupled from the site’s disclaimer to go viral (as so often happens), but it is not true; the story is satire, and the Proud Boys remain the Proud Boys.

The post Did the Proud Boys Rebrand as the Leather Men Following a Hashtag Offensive? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

amy coney barrett, analysis, catholicism, gilead, margaret atwood, people of hope, people of praise, religion, religious sects, supreme court, the handmaid's tale, trump administration, TruthOrFiction

Does a Potential U.S. Supreme Court Candidate Belong to a Group That Inspired ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’?

News of United States Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death was barely a day old before national figures started to discuss her replacement, despite the opposition of those very same figures to doing so in 2016, after Antonin Scalia’s death.

As the discussion continued, one particular name kept surfacing as a possible contender: Amy Coney Barrett, whose name was also floated by several entities in 2018.

It didn’t take very long for media scrutiny to turn up details about a religious sect to which Barrett belongs:

“We admire the first Christians who were led by the Holy Spirit to form a community,” the website says, tracing its origins to the late 1960s when students and faculty at Notre Dame experienced “a renewal of Christian enthusiasm and fervor, together with charismatic gifts such as speaking in tongues and physical healing.”

Its most devoted members make a lifelong commitment to the group, known as a covenant.

From 1970 until recently, women with leadership roles in the organization were called handmaids, but the popularity of the 2017-to-present Hulu television series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on Atwood’s 1985 book, appears to have led to a change.

“Recognizing that the meaning of this term has shifted dramatically in our culture in recent years, we no longer use the term handmaid,” the group said after the 2018 media interest.

Coral Anika Theill, a former People of Praise member from decades ago, has described the group as an abusive cult in which women are completely obedient to men and independent thinkers are humiliated, interrogated, shamed and shunned.

Theill, who self-published a book about how her ex-husband dragged her through a number of religious groups, said she was campaigning to stop Barrett from being nominated.

Shortly after that, rumors began to fly that this same group actually inspired Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, perhaps in part because of Carol Anika Theill’s accounting in a September 2019 blog post as well as the striking similarity in the terms used:

During the years of our marriage he was an avid follower of Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly, Mary Pride, Bill Gothard and the Patriarchal Quiverfull movement. He professed to be a born again, “spirited filled” Christian. My husband’s Christian beliefs defined my role as his wife the same way Martin Luther did in the 16th century, “Even though they [wives] grow weary and wear themselves out with child-bearing, it does not matter; let them go on bearing children TILL THEY DIE, that is what they are there for.”

I was required to be a “helpmeet” in a world like the one from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” My abuser used coercive control, isolation and intimidation tactics to strip me of my personhood, safety and freedoms as a United States citizen.

“A Handmaid’s Tale” is a dystopian tale of a “handmaid”- a woman basically designated to be a breeder. She is treated as property, has no real rights, and her only value to society is to make children for officials and their barren wives. After the excesses of the world created so much pollution and illness the birth rate fell drastically low, a re-forming of society occurred.

In this society, the rights of women and children were reconfigured while being told they were the ones in charge, and the patriarchy was solidified through strict, subversive control of women’s status and roles. The society was structured around the lower masculine values of competition, dominance, and punishment.

However, while Theill compared the group she was part of — “People of Praise” — to The Handmaid’s Tale, she stopped short of identifying it as the group that inspired Atwood’s infamous creation.

So did a widely cited 1986 New York Times interview with Atwood about her book, alluding not to the group’s name but to its practices:

The President and Congress have been assassinated by right-wing religious fanatics who have overthrown the Government and set up a monotheocratic dictatorship based on biblical principles in a land they now call Gilead. Women may no longer possess jobs, or property, or money of any kind. Pollution has sharply reduced fertility, and certain women, selected for their ability to breed, have become slaves – Handmaids -forced to try to conceive through joyless copulation in bizarre menages a trois with their Commanders and the Commanders’ barren wives.

Thus begins the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s controversial and critically acclaimed new novel, ”The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“I delayed writing it for about three years after I got the idea because I felt it was too crazy,” Miss Atwood says, sitting in the offices of her publisher, Houghton Mifflin. ”Then two things happened. I started noticing that a lot of the things I thought I was more or less making up were now happening, and indeed more of them have happened since the publication of the book.There is a sect now, a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect, which calls the women handmaids. They don’t go in for polygamy of this kind but they do threaten the handmaids according to the biblical verse I use in the book – sit down and shut up.”

And a 2017 article about Atwood in the New Yorker referenced a newspaper clipping:

Another box was labelled “Handmaid’s Tale: Background,” and Atwood pried the box open to reveal files containing sheaves of newspaper clippings from the mid-eighties.

“Clip-clippety-clip, out of the newspaper I clipped things,” she said, as we looked through the cuttings. There were stories of abortion and contraception being outlawed in Romania, and reports from Canada lamenting its falling birth rate, and articles from the U.S. about Republican attempts to withhold federal funding from clinics that provided abortion services. There were reports about the threat to privacy posed by debit cards, which were a novelty at the time, and accounts of U.S. congressional hearings devoted to the regulation of toxic industrial emissions, in the wake of the deadly gas leak in Bhopal, India. An Associated Press item reported on a Catholic congregation in New Jersey being taken over by a fundamentalist sect in which wives were called “handmaidens”—a word that Atwood had underlined.

Atwood added in yet another interview — this with the Los Angeles Times in 1990, just ahead of the film version of her landmark novel — that Gilead was deliberately placed in the northeastern United States:

More specifically, the bulk of the tale happens in Massachusetts, in the environs of Boston and Cambridge, near a future-shock version of Harvard University. That’s where Atwood’s heroine, Kate, abided with her gentle husband and bright-eyed child before the revolution brought on the religious Republic of Gilead.

In a hotel lobby interview in Berlin, Atwood gladly filled in the Cambridge, Mass., references in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” starting with the grim, monastic clothes store, Lilies of the Field, placed in what had been, in pre-revolutionary times, Cambridge’s beloved repertoire movie house, the Brattle Theatre.

Atwood said, “The grounds in front of Harvard’s Widener Library is where they have public hangings.”

“The Handmaid’s Tale” got its macabre geography from Atwood’s 1962 graduate school stint at Radcliffe College. “Harvard gave my book a sniffy review in Harvard magazine,” she said. “But one of the persons it’s dedicated to is Perry Miller, through whom at Harvard I studied the American Puritans in great detail. The roots of totalitarianism in America are found, I discovered, in the theocracy of the 17th Century. ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is not that far behind ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ my take on American Puritanism.”

These pieces of evidence set off a cascade of headlines and stories containing the claim that People of Praise was indeed the inspiration for the religious group that founded the fictional Republic of Gilead. This was quickly followed by a ripple of corrections, clarifications, and footnotes (despite the same topic being covered exhaustively to little backlash in 2018):

Correction: This article’s headline originally stated that People of Praise inspired ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. The book’s author, Margaret Atwood, has never specifically mentioned the group as being the inspiration for her work. A New Yorker profile of the author from 2017 mentions a newspaper clipping as part of her research for the book of a different charismatic Catholic group, People of Hope. Newsweek regrets the error.

But the inevitable backlash and pearl-clutching about the purported “anti-Catholic smears” dogging Amy Coney Barrett’s charismatic Catholic sect missed the point of the stories and their corrections: That not only is there more than one group operating in the United States that could have realistically inspired the Republic of Gilead as it was originally written by Atwood in her book The Handmaid’s Tale (and, it must be added, whose power she toppled in a more recent sequel, The Testaments), but that their practices (heavily patriarchal organization, prophecies, glossolalia, denoting female members “handmaidens” or “handmaids”) are so close to one another as to be nearly indistinguishable.

Arturo Garcia also contributed to this report.

The post Does a Potential U.S. Supreme Court Candidate Belong to a Group That Inspired ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’? appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

analysis, black lives matter, Facebook, Jacob Blake, Kenosha, mass shootings, militias, racism, radicalization, TruthOrFiction, white supremacists, wisconsin

Two Killed in Kenosha During Racial Violence Inflamed in Facebook Groups

As racial violence escalated and echoed throughout the United States during the summer of 2020 and “civil defense” groups formed on Facebook and appeared at demonstrations throughout the country, a gunman shot and killed two people during an overnight protest against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The shooting took place during protests ignited by yet another police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, who was paralyzed when police shot him several times in the back — less than three minutes after arriving at the scene, where according to multiple eyewitness accounts Blake was trying to de-escalate a dispute:

Blake was shot Sunday evening as he tried to get into a small SUV with his three sons, ages 8, 5, and 3, inside, according to video and statements from his family.

A bystander’s video of the shooting that swept across social media appeared to show the officer grab Blake by the back of his shirt as he tried to get into the SUV, then shoot him seven times at point-blank range. In the video, Blake did not appear to have anything in his hands.

As protests continued in Kenosha, armed members of local militias began actively “patrolling” the streets to “protect” businesses. On the third night of unrest, a gunman shot several people, leaving at least two dead.

It is not clear whether the gunman was directly affiliated with any militia. However, the Kenosha Guard added to the already tense mix by posting calls to arms, rife with racist dog whistles, to its public Facebook page and asked “patriots” to come support them:

One post read: “Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend out (sic) City tonight from the evil thugs? Nondoubt (sic) they are currently planning on the next part of the City to burn tonight!”

A later post, aimed at the Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis, read, in part:

“I ask that you do NOT have your officers tell us to go home under threat of arrest as you have done in the past. We are willing to talk to KPD and open a discussion. It is evident, that no matter how many Officers, deputies, and other law enforcement officers that are here, you will still be outnumbered.”

A Journal Sentinel reporter earlier in the evening observed a group of armed men with long guns standing guard at a dry cleaning business on Sheridan Road near 59th Street, some on the roof.

Police told them to get off the roof and a person shouted back: “Officer, this is our business.” Police did not ultimately order them off the roof.

Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth confirmed that such groups were in the fray. “They’re a militia,” he told reporters. “They’re like a vigilante group.” Despite repeated requests for moderation, The Verge reported that Facebook refused to take down the militia group’s page until after the shooting:

Facebook took down Kenosha Guard’s Facebook page Wednesday morning, identifying the posts as violating community standards. But while the accounts were ultimately removed, new evidence suggests the platform had ample warning about the account before the shooting brought the group to prominence.

At least two separate Facebook users reported the account for inciting violence prior to the shooting, The Verge has learned. In each case, the group and its counter-protest event were examined by Facebook moderators and found not to be in violation of the platform’s policies.

It remains unclear whether the shooting suspect was part of that particular militia group. However, he was publicly identified as seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse from nearby Antioch, Illinois — an aspiring police officer, former police cadet, and apparent gun aficionado — who had interacted with law enforcement and militia members throughout the evening:

In recent months, pro-cop vigilantes have been showing up heavily armed at protests across the country to defend public property, often warmly received by local law enforcement.

Police interacted with the alleged gunman at various locations in Kenosha throughout the night. In one video, Rittenhouse is seen chatting with police who gave him a bottle of water and thanked him for being there.

He was also seen in the vicinity of a group of armed militiamen, who had tasked themselves with protecting a gas station from damage.

[…]

The apparent shooter, meanwhile, was seen on video walking away from the scene — his AR-style rifle clearly visible, his hands above his head. But Kenosha police who were responding to the reports of gunfire showed no interest in arresting or even questioning the man.

Instead, they asked him for directions. “Is someone injured, straight ahead?” an officer asks him via loudspeaker.

“Get out of the road,” said another.

He even approached an idling police car, going up close to the window, but then appeared to change his mind and walked away.

Brent Ford, 24, a photographer, witnessed the entire scene. “He had his hands up and they told him to get out of there, even though everyone was yelling that he was the shooter,” Ford told VICE News. “The police didn’t seem to hear or care what the crowd was saying.”

BuzzFeed dug more into the suspect’s social media presence, finding a long history of pro-gun and pro-law enforcement posts, as well as a TikTok video from a rally for United States President Donald Trump that Rittenhouse had attended several months previously:

On his now-deleted Facebook page, Rittenhouse is seen posing with an AR-15 style rifle above the words “Blue Lives Matter.” Nearly all of his public Facebook posts are related to the movement, including two posts in memory of officers who were killed in the line of duty. On Dec. 22, 2018, he asked his friends to donate to “Humanizing the Badge” a “nonprofit organization seeking to forge stronger relationships between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.”

His social media pages indicated he had access to at least two different types of guns before Tuesday. A video posted to one of his two TikTok accounts on July 21 shows him assembling what appears to be the rifle pictured in his Facebook profile image. In two videos posted Aug. 13, he and a friend are shown firing a weapon he identifies as a 12-gauge shotgun. In these videos, Rittenhouse is wearing a backward cap featuring an image of the American flag that appears to be the same hat worn by the shooter.

We have asked Facebook whether they will take another look at their policies around “civil defense” and “patriot” groups in the wake of the shootings, as well as the heavy influence of both racist rhetoric and the weaponized, anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy theory in such groups. We also asked them about a circulating screenshot appearing to show that militia members from the Kenosha Guard were openly coordinating with Kenosha police on the social media platform. We have yet to receive a response.

The post Two Killed in Kenosha During Racial Violence Inflamed in Facebook Groups appeared first on Truth or Fiction?.

River of fact-checked news