News bits: Online disinformation rises again; The rule of law fails again; And again

Google drops attempts to reduce disinformation: It looks like tech companies are giving up and walking away from trying to deal with lies, slanders and hateful crackpottery online. People will be killed, e.g., because anti-vaxx lies will lead to some needless deaths. Why would tech companies do this? Profit. Profit trumps the public interest, which includes both support for democracy and respect for truth and human life. The NYT reports:

Combating Disinformation Wanes at Social Media Giants

Last month, the company owned by Google, quietly reduced its small team of policy experts in charge of handling misinformation, according to three people with knowledge of the decision. The cuts, part of the reduction of 12,000 employees by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, left only one person in charge of misinformation policy worldwide, one of the people said. 

The cuts reflect a trend across the industry that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that social media platforms put in place in recent years to ban or tamp down on disinformation — like false claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine or the integrity of elections around the world. Twitter, under its new owner, Elon Musk, has slashed its staff, while Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has shifted its focus and resources to the immersive world of the metaverse.

Faced with economic headwinds and political and legal pressure, the social media giants have shown signs that fighting false information online is no longer as high a priority, raising fears among experts who track the issue that it will further erode trust online.  

“I wouldn’t say the war is over, but I think we’ve lost key battles,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of the liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America. After years of efforts, he described a mounting sense of fatigue in the struggle. “I do think we, as a society, have lost the appetite to keep battling. And that means we will lose the war.”

Decades of ruthless authoritarian dark free speech is wearing American society down. As Americans become more accepting of being lied to and cynically manipulated, democracy weakens. Companies, being profit-centric, feel less and less concern for public backlash. Profit lust never goes away and dark free speech is more profitable than honest speech. Relentless wearing down of pro-democracy norms is a key part of how modern demagogic authoritarians and tyrants ceaselessly work to break the back of democracy and the rule of law.  

-------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------

Rule of law failure: The NYT reports on another disappointment as another powerful elite gets off the hook:

The Justice Department has decided not to bring charges against Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, after a lengthy sex-trafficking investigation, three people with knowledge of the decision said on Wednesday.

In 2021, federal prosecutors began examining whether Mr. Gaetz, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, broke federal sex-trafficking laws, focusing on his relationships with women recruited online for sex, and whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl.

Once again, plausible deniability, the impossibility of proving intent and/or general DoJ reluctance to look political allow another scumbag to go unpunished. Is this is just the old norm or the new, post-Trump presidency norm? For me, it’s hard to tell. No, I don’t know if Gaetz broke laws or not, but given his arrogant moral depravity he could have. And given the DoJ’s abdication of law enforcement for rich or powerful white collar criminals, especially politicians, a reasonable assumption is that he did it and the DoJ won’t do anything about it.

-------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------

Another failure: In a NYT opinion piece, Neal K. Katyal, Georgetown University Law Center professor and an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, paints a discouraging picture:

Under Trump, Barr and Durham Made a Mockery of the Rules I Wrote

The recent revelations about Special Counsel John H. Durham’s investigation of the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry paint a bleak picture — one that’s thoroughly at odds with governing law. Those rules, called the Special Counsel Regulations, contemplate someone independent of the attorney general who can reassure the public that justice is being done.

I drafted those guidelines as a young Justice Department official, and there is zero chance that anyone involved in the process, as it was reported on by The New York Times, would think that former Attorney General William Barr or Mr. Durham acted appropriately.

According to the report, Mr. Barr granted Mr. Durham special counsel status to dig into a theory that the Russia investigation likely emerged from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. That investigation took almost four years (longer than Mr. Mueller’s inquiry) and appears to be ending soon without any hint of a deep state plot against Mr. Trump.

Furthermore, the reporting suggests that the Durham inquiry suffered from internal dissent and ethical disputes as it lurched from one unsuccessful path to another, even as Americans heard a misleading narrative of its progress. 

But now Merrick Garland, not Mr. Barr, is the attorney general, and the regulations give him the power to require Mr. Durham to explain himself — and to discipline and fire Mr. Durham if the explanation is not adequate.

Unfortunately, Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr allowed a misleading narrative to gain traction in public. When news organizations began to report in October 2019 that Mr. Durham’s investigation had morphed from an administrative inquiry into a criminal investigation, creating the misimpression that there might have been criminal wrongdoing by those involved in the Russia investigation, neither man corrected the narrative, even though the real investigation involved Mr. Trump.

Katyal criticizes Garland for not doing squat to make Durham explain himself or even provide a final report. Maybe that will change, but in view of Garland’s track record of incompetence and stonewalling and refusing to do his job, there is not much basis for hope. From what I can tell, the DoJ is not much of a threat to most (~99.99% ?) elite white collar criminals and most (~99.9% ?) of their crimes. 

A key pillar of democracy has fallen to corruption, partisan politics and professional incompetence.