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 13th, 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 1st,
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 3rd 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.
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