Let’s Face It

The rather clear intention of the Russian “hackers and spreaders of disinformation” during the 2016 presidential election was to sow chaos into the American voting process. Find vulnerabilities in individual voters – especially the gullible and believers in conspiracy theories on the right and the left – and use automation to select pre-formatted emails and social media posts to create confusion, bolster falsehoods and twist the election results by catering to those vulnerabilities. Turn factions more against each other. Polarize to the max, and especially target a Russia-savvy Hillary Clinton for as much character assassination as possible. Pretty much the unanimous finding, with very solid evidence, from all our national intelligence agencies. Indeed, if you have read the recent federal indictments against 12 major Russian operatives, ominously handed down on Friday, July 13^th, that evidence is overwhelming.

How much that 2016 campaign produced the desired result of getting Donald Trump elected we will never really know. We do not have the tools to enter the minds of the voters who may have been impacted. Trump lost the popular vote by millions of votes, but the Russian hackers were sophisticated enough in their digital assault to prioritize disinformation in swing states, where the Electoral College would be the decider.

Even as the Republicans have cut out money in the House budget to fight continuing Russian interference in our upcoming mid-terms, there have been loud cries from leaders in both parties, major political constituencies and business leaders, to halt the unceasing Russian interference in our election process. Both Facebook and Twitter took massive valuation hits to their share prices directly linked to a public perception that these social media sites have become unreliable, communication platforms easily usurped by Russian hackers or anyone else desiring to spread mass disinformation to the American public. Personal information was traded like shares on a stock market.

Both major social media sites have “seen the light” and are busy limiting access to personal information and implementing intensive new programs to cull “fake news” and “robotic” messengering… including the viral spread of such content. It requires lots of human decision-making. Artificially intelligent software isn’t quite there yet. These giants have been editing, censoring and taking down with aplomb. They have been enforcing their anti-hate-content censorship pens, banning several infamous but very popular conspiracy theory-advocates with “hate” at the core of their messengering. Good news? Finally?! Maybe… but maybe not.

That such social media platforms have gotten so huge is a menacing factor. Their sheer size is larger than many governments around the world and their reach is usually greater than any other communications medium on the planet. In short, they are so big that they almost governments on their own. The First Amendment does not apply to private organizations (“Congress shall make no law…” which, under the Fourteen Amendment, extends this to state legislatures as well). Still, the notion of “free speech” pervades our democratic approach to mass media. There are shudders of “do we trust these corporations with censoring speech” all up and down the legal community. But what is the alternative?

Without some limitations, Russian hackers have done anything but slow down. The federal government is woefully unreactive in any pragmatic sense, perhaps reflecting the Trump obsession with Russia and his fear that his November 2016 victory would be shown to have resulted from outside hacking. Trump’s own sense of political legitimacy is at stake.

His disdain for the First Amendment and related democratic conventions is obvious as he continues to label any mass medium and any group of people who disagree with his policies as “enemies of the people,” an approach and term that have been castigated the world over, most recently the United Nations. On August 1^st, U.N. human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, opined that Donald Trump’s criticism of journalists amounts to an attack on the freedom of the press and could provoke violence against reporters. Thus, with government effectively out of the mix, social media sites have stepped in to “solve the problem.” Maybe, just maybe, they have made things worse.

The efforts to cull the undesirable content by both Twitter and Facebook seems to have had some unintended consequences, creating more of that same chaos that Russia is working so hard to foment. Those Russian policy-makers must be laughing heartedly. The August 3^rd FastCompany.com explains, drilling down on some of the recently purged content:

“Unlike the 2016 disinformation campaign, which sowed chaos by pitting the American right and left against each other through the creation of pro-gun and anti-immigrant memes for conservatives and Black Lives Matter and pro-gay memes for liberals, these accounts were much more focused on mimicking groups opposed to President Trump. One page called ‘Resisters’ had been organizing a large counter-protest to the far right’s Unite the Right rally planned for this month in Washington, D.C., in which 2,600 users had expressed interest.

“In addition to ‘Resisters,’ the four most popular pages tied to ‘bad actors’ were ‘Aztlan Warriors,’ ‘Black Elevation,’ and ‘Mindful Being,’ Facebook said. Together, those pages generated 9,500 ‘organic posts,’ and close to 150 ads, paid for with about $11,000 in U.S. and Canadian currency.

“But the shutdown has impacted the lives of many real activists who were also involved in that counter-protest, as well as others who shared or commented on the suspect Facebook pages without apparently knowing that they were suspected of being fake. The removal of the event’s page sparked outrage at Facebook among activists.

“‘Do we really want an Internet where giant tech companies like Facebook are the arbiters of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’ and can censor whatever they want without oversight or accountability?’ said Evan Greer, the deputy director of digital rights group Fight for the Future.

“Facebook has been praised for being proactive in advance of the midterm elections, and to be sure, the disclosure stood in stark contrast to the company’s apparently reluctant response to Russian propaganda last year. But cybersecurity experts tell Fast Company that the shutdown may have still accomplished the goals of the trolls: to sow chaos and breed mistrust among the American electorate. ‘Maybe they wanted to get caught,’ says a veteran intelligence operative familiar with Russian disinformation campaigns, who spoke anonymously because they still work with the U.S. government.

“‘Even better for them, the shutdown was done in a very public way, making headlines in the mainstream media. Now, those groups—and by extension, the anti-Trump resistance—is a little tainted in the eyes of some Americans, who will claim that their activities don’t represent genuine disaffection with the president.’ For example, that counter-protest is already being derided by conservatives on social media as a farce, though there is plenty of authentic grassroots support for it.

“Others also wondered if the company had pulled the plug on the accounts before doing more, with the assistance of law enforcement agencies like the FBI, to identify who’s behind them.”

 Okay, something should be done to identify intentional election manipulators and consistent purveyors of falsehoods, especially when the process is automated. But who determines what is false? The First and Fourteenth Amendments might just make that impossible for state and federal governments. Or is there some precedent in the regulation of explicit content on public broadcast bandwidth? What are the processes to vet content? Why should we trust those efforts? What if that same censorship technology is harnessed to favor one political viewpoint over another? And exactly what do we do, assuming there is even a clear process to determine falsehood, once we identify that malignancy. The questions are obvious; the answers are elusive.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the very foundations of our democracy, the sustainability of our form of government, are under assault from so many sources that they just might fracture and shatter, taking down the entire United States of America as a functioning nation.