New Twitter Files: How Obama Created an Agency to Create Blacklists of Supposed Foreign Disinformation Operators... and How Those Mechanisms Were Almost Immediately Turned, Surprise Surprise, Against the American Conservative Movement

Matt Taibbi wrote this post as a backgrounder to the today's Twitter Files.

A new #TwitterFiles thread will be dropping in a few hours, at noon EST. It follows up the Hamilton 68 story of a month ago with examples of state-funded digital blacklisting campaigns run amok. It's self-explanatory, but some advance context might help:

In 2015-2016, during the brief, forgotten period when Islamic terrorism was fading as a national obsession and Trumpian "domestic extremism" had not yet become one, Barack Obama made a series of decisions that may yet prove devastating to his legacy.

The short version is he signed Executive Order 13271, establishing a "Global Engagement Center" ("GEC") to "counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations." This act got almost no press and even within government, almost no one noticed.

In the bigger picture, however, a lame duck president kick-started the process of shifting the national security establishment's focus from counterterrorism to "disinformation." Whether by malfunction or design, this abrupt course change of Washington's contracting supertanker would have dramatic consequences. In fact, the tale of how America's information warfare mechanism turned inward, against "threats" in our own population, might someday be remembered as the story of our time, with collective panic over "disinfo" defining this generation in much the same way the Red Scare defined the culture of the fifties.

This is a complicated story and it would be a mistake to jump to simplistic conclusions, like that the Global Engagement Center (humorously nicknamed "GECK" or "YUCK" by detractors in other agencies) is an evil Orwellian mind-control scheme. It isn't. But for a few crucial bad decisions, it could have fulfilled a useful or at least logical mission, much as the United States Information Agency (USIA) once did. However, instead of stressing research and public reports, as the USIA did when responding to Soviet accusations that Americans had caused the AIDS crisis, GEC funded a secret list of contractors and employed a more surreptitious approach to "counter-disinformation," sending companies like Twitter voluminous reports on foreign "ecosystems" -- in practice, blacklists.

GEC was not conceived as a partisan mechanism to defang conservative media, despite the recent true and damning series of reports by the Washington Examiner, outlining how a GEC-funded NGO in England used algorithmic scoring to de-rank outlets like The Daily Wire and help papers like the New York Times earn more ad revenue. The blacklisting tales you'll be reading about later today on Twitter also primarily target American conservatives, though GEC and GEC-funded contractors also target left-friendly movements like the gilets jaunes (yellow vests), socialist media outlets like Canada's Global Research, even the Free Palestine movement.

The scary angle on GEC is not so much the agency as the sprawling infrastructure of "disinformation labs" that have grown around it.

I keep banging this drum: the people the media is calling "experts" and "researchers" in "the disinformation space" are in fact just shut-in hyperpartisans who sit on Twitter all f*cking day and are basically unemployable. Then one day they decided to call their Twitter account "Disinformation Watch" or whatever and announced that they were experts and because they had the same politics as the media, the media did absolutely no vetting to determine if they were experts or just partisan hacks with axes to grind and nearly unlimited time available to issue "reports" on the internet.

Underneath America's love affair with "anti-disinformation" in the Trump years -- which expressed itself in the seemingly instant construction of a sprawling complex of disinformation studies "labs" at institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Clemson, UT, Pitt, William and Mary, the University of Washington, and other locations -- lay a devastating secret. Most of these "experts" know nothing. Many have skill, if you can call mesmerizing dumb reporters a skill, but in the area of identifying true bad actors, few know more than the average person on the street.

This is described repeatedly in the #TwitterFiles. In one sequence Twitter was contacted by Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times, who was writing a hagiographic profiles of "disinformation" warrior Renee DiResta, who'd achieved some renown as a campaigner against vaccine misinformation. Frenkel wrote Twitter to ask why they hadn't hired "independent researchers" like DiResta, Jonathan Albright, and Jonathon Morgan -- coincidentally, all hired witnesses of the Senate Intelligence Committee -- to help Twitter "better understand" its own business.

At the sight of Frenkel's provocative note, some Twitter execs lost it.

"The word 'researcher' has taken on a very broad meaning," snapped Nick Pickles. "Renee is literally doing this as a hobby... Of those three only [Albright] is the most credible, but... the bulk of his work is Medium blogs."

"Like CVE before it, misinformation is becoming a cottage industry," agreed comms official Ian Plunkett, referencing "countering violent extremism," a.k.a. counterterrorism.

Today's thread among other things will detail crude digital blacklisting schemes dreamed up by this new cottage industry. Each features the same design "flaw," in which giant lists of supposed foreign disinformationists somehow also come to include ordinary Americans, often with the same political leanings.

Guess which leanings those might be.

Read the whole thing; that's just the first half. He notes that Americans fund this system through this taxes, so we're now paying for our own censorship.

Or, actually, conservatives are paying for our own censorship. Liberals are paying taxes to muzzle us. They are, as usual, getting their money's worth from the government their partisans control.

The actual Twitter Files, #17, starts here. I'll quote them here refer you to the thread for the supporting screencaps and other documentation, you lazy-bones.

The thread starts with 40,000 Twitter accounts -- accounts, not posts -- being referred to Twitter's censors by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. The DFRL is funded by the GEC described in the article above, created by Obama.

The accoiunts are accused of being "inauthentic" -- bots or paid ASSETS. In this instance, they're accused of being some kind of bots agitating for Hindu nationalism in India.

By the way, note that The Regime didn't like the Hindu Nationalist party and still doesn't. If these accounts were tweeting on behalf of the socialist parties, they would not have flagged them.

But it turns out, many of these accounts were perfectly real users, often conservative Americans, who just favored Hindu nationalism in India.

There are a lot of Indians in America, you know. They read the news from the homeland.

4. "I have no connection to any Hindu folks... Just a Reagan Republican here in CT," replied "Bobby Hailstone."

"A Hindu nationalist? I've never even been out of this country. Let alone the state of NJ," said "Lady_DI816."

"These people are insane!" said "Krista Woods."

I remember occasionally covering this party, led by Modi, I think, positively.

But of course, I'm already known to be a RUSSIAN ASSET.

But no one can come by opinions (however shallow and transitory) that The Regime doesn't approve of without being accused of either being AGENTS of foreign disinformation operations, or DUPES and VICTIMS of foreign disinformation operations.

If we had all the correct information, we'd just believe all the crap that warmongering c*nt and creepy technofascist Anne Applebaum believes, you know!

Not only were some of the accounts real people, but "many" of them were -- in fact, virtually all of them were real.

5. Twitter agreed, one reason many of the accounts remain active. "Thanks, Andy," replied Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth. "I spot-checked a number of these accounts, and virtually all appear to be real people."

7. DFRLab is funded by the U.S. Government, specifically the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

Director Graham Brookie denies DFRLab it uses tax money to track Americans, saying its GEC grants have "an exclusively international focus."

8. But Americans on DFR's list, like Marysel Urbanik, are unconvinced its focus is "exclusively international."

"This is un-American," says Urbanik, who immigrated from Castro's Cuba. "They do this in places that don't believe in free speech."

9. The Global Engagement Center is usually listed as a State Department entity. It's not. Created in Obama's last year, GEC is an interagency group "within" State, whose initial partners included FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.

10. GEC's mandate: "To recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign... disinformation."

On the surface, it's the same mission the United States Information Agency (USIA) fulfilled for decades, with a catch. USIA focused on foreign "disinfo."

GEC's focus is wider.

11. "It's an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex," says a former intelligence source. "All the shit we pulled in other countries since the Cold War, some morons decided to bring home."

12.GEC could have avoided controversy by focusing on exposing/answering "disinformation" with research and a more public approach, as USIA did. Instead, it funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious -- and idiotic -- new form of blacklisting.

15. GEC's "Chinese" list included multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees based abroad. "Not exactly Anderson's besties, but CNN assets if you will," quipped Twitter's Patrick Conlon.

"A total crock," added Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

The following is important: This is how the GEC did a soft-shoe-and-a-shuffle and stopped concentrating on actual Russian disinformation efforts and started focusing on American conservatives and other dissidents.

They argued in 2020 that even if some people, like conservatives, aren't in any way associated with Russian government operators, if we're even talking about the same things, we're part of the same "ecosystem," and thus "amplifying" those toxic messages, and thus should be counted a RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION.

Do not let mere technical "independence" from Russian entities fool you, the report says. Russian agent, conservative commentator -- they're just two heads of the same disinformation coin.

In so many words, that is.

Tomato, tahmahtoh-- let's call the whole thing censored.

This is also big: Twitter actually looked into this stuff and rejected it.

But you know who does absolutely no fact-checking about stories they can use to bash Republicans, don't you?

That's right, the Truth Tellers of the Super Anti-Disinformation US Media.

22. Twitter staffers had professionalism. They tended to look at least once before declaring a thing foreign disinformation. This made them a tough crowd for GEC.

Fortunately, there's an easier mark: the news media.

23.GEC's game: create an alarmist report, send it to the slower animals in journalism's herd, and wait as reporters bang on Twitter's door, demanding to know why this or that "ecosystem" isn't obliterated.

Twitter emails ooze frustration at such queries. UGGG! reads one.

25.Twitter disagreed with GEC's alert about Russian "disinfo" in South America, which appeared to confused cause and effect.

As Rodericks put it, "I believe what they mean is: 'there was a surge in accounts that agreed with Moscow-aligned narratives' = Moscow controlled."

26. Roth noted Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy was quoted in Frenkel's story and said: "Seems like ASD are back at their old tricks."

27. Roth was referring to the fact that the ASD created Hamilton 68, another guilt-by-association scheme detailed in Twitter Files #15. The Hamilton "dashboard" claimed to track accounts linked to "Russian influence activities," but the list was largely made up of Americans.

28. The Hamilton 68 dashboard creator, J.M. Berger, was on the GEC payroll until June of 2017, just before the dashboard's launch. Hamilton claimed the list was "the fruit of more than three years of observation."

Berger "unequivocally" denies working on Hamilton for GEC.

30. The Hamilton 68 dashboard employed digital alchemy to create streams of headlines tying Americans to "foreign" disinformation.

The "ecosystem" reports GEC and many "disinformation" laboratories feed reporters are often just subtler versions of the same thing.

31. In a crucial in-house Q&A in mid-2017, Roth was asked if it was possible to detect "Russian fingerprints" using Twitter's public data. Though "you can make inferences," he said, "in short, no."

32. Twitter therefore knew from the first days of the "foreign interference" mania that the media zone was flooded with bad actors playing up cyber-threats for political or financial reasons, GEC included.

33. "GEC has doubled their budget by aggressively overstating threats through unverified accusations that can't be replicated either by external academics or by Twitter," wrote Rodericks.

34.The same is true of New Knowledge, the scandal-plagued company staffed by former NSA officials that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) hired to do "expert" assessments of the initial batches of "suspect" Facebook and Twitter accounts.

35. When Twitter saw New Knowledge and its reporter-worshipped "disinformation" gurus like Jonathon Morgan and Renee DiResta were making analytical leaps they felt were impossible, they knew something was off.

38.Twitter's Nick Pickles: "New Knowledge's pitch... pick accounts that they have deemed to be IRA controlled, and then spin up bigger macro analysis... stories about '2000 Russian accounts tweeting about Kavanagh/Walkway/Caravan' [were] often based on media activity from NK."

39. Just like Hamilton 68, GEC and New Knowledge littered the media landscape with flawed or flat-out wrong news stories. Exacerbating matters, Americans in both cases paid taxes to become the subject of these manipulative operations.

40. Particularly egregious: a New Knowledge report to the Senate on Russian interference was leaked just days before it was outed in a scheme to fake Russian influence in an Alabama election, and no media outlets issued retractions.
No SSCI staff have commented, either.

41. Foreign cyber-threats exist, and there are sophisticated ways of detecting them. But GEC and its subcontractors don't use those, instead deploying junk science that often lumps true bad actors in with organic opinion.

I must, must, MUST be heard on "the Hairball Chart!"

It is made by an off-the-shelf bit of "network analysis" software. All the software does is pick up connections between data nodes -- say, between two users mentioning the same politician -- and then build a little faux-3-D model purporting to show the "linkages" between all the "players" in the "network."

This is absolute dogshit, for so many reasons, including user bias -- they are choosing, in the first place, who to nominate to put in "the network." These assholes mention Russia all the time, but they don't put their own Twitter accounts in the Hairball as among those which mention Russia, for example.

For another, it just tells you nothing -- look, a bunch of conservative accounts are opposed to the current foreign policy of a Democrat President, which currently consists of fighting a proxy war of dubious value, and this war happens to be with Russia. This doesn't make anyone opposing this Russian agents -- it makes them opposed to the war, and, at worse, just partisans opposed to Biden.

Anyway, for years and years internet "researchers" have been using this retarded bit of visualization software to prove, for example, that the conservative backlash to woke Star Wars is actually being organized by and directed by Steve Bannon -- look, they're connected on the Hairball Chart! You see! Proof!

That's not something I'm making up. That really happened, and got a lot of media attention.

The media looks at this chart and thinks Oh, that must be proof! A Computer made that, and computers are basically made of math, so this is true! I'll report this as a fact from a "disinformation expert!"

Trust the media, everyone! They'll protect you from disinformation!

They're really smart and good at their jobs and not lazy partisan hacks so incompetent it would be laughable if it weren't so infuriating!

44.An IG report shows GEC was initially obligated $98.7 million, of which roughly $80 million came from the Pentagon. It reportedly gave to at least 39 different organizations, whose names were redacted.

Why is this list secret?

45. Twitter comms official Ian Plunkett wrote years ago that "misinformation, like [countering violent extremism, or CVE] before it, is becoming a cottage industry."

Disinformation is the counterterrorism mission, rebranded for domestic targets.

46. Reauthorization for GEC's funding is up for a vote this year. Can we at least stop paying to blacklist ourselves?

The GEC was contacted by the Atlantic Council, which said they didn't publish the list of suspected Indian bots because they didn't have faith in that particular researcher.

When Matt Taibbi asked them if they therefore contacted Reuters and told them to be skeptical about the story they'd done on the list, the Atlantic Council got busy and had other things to do and couldn't find the time to answer.

DEFUND THE ATLANTIC COUNCIL

Not another penny more from US taxpayers.

posted by Ace at 04:14 PM

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