The disinformation industry is alive and thriving

The New York Times writes:

In May, several French and German social media influencers received a strange proposal.

A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it.

But it asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists.

Some recipients posted screenshots of the offer. Exposed, Fazze scrubbed its social media accounts. That same week, Brazilian and Indian influencers posted videos echoing Fazze’s script to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

The scheme appears to be part of a secretive industry that security analysts and American officials say is exploding in scale: disinformation for hire.

Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies.

They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability.

“Disinfo-for-hire actors being employed by government or government-adjacent actors is growing and serious,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, calling it “a boom industry.”

Similar campaigns have been recently found promoting India’s ruling party, Egyptian foreign policy aims and political figures in Bolivia and Venezuela.  

A wave of anti-American posts in Iraq, seemingly organic, were tracked to a public relations company that was separately accused of faking anti-government sentiment in Israel.  

The trend emerged after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, experts say. Cambridge, a political consulting firm linked to members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was found to have harvested data on millions of Facebook users.

The controversy drew attention to methods common among social media marketers. Cambridge used its data to target hyper-specific audiences with tailored messages. It tested what resonated by tracking likes and shares.

The episode taught a generation of consultants and opportunists that there was big money in social media marketing for political causes, all disguised as organic activity.

Ahh, the stench of dark free speech in the morning. There's nothing quite like it. But, plausible deniability comes pretty close.

Questions: How can democracy and truth defend themselves against the endless onslaught of lies, deceit, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation (fear, anger, bigotry, distrust, hate, intolerance, etc.), motivated reasoning and the like? How can any defense intended to protect democracy and truth be prevented from use by demagogues, tyrants, crooks and kleptocrats to attack, and maybe even destroy, democracy and truth? Is the dark free speech market just a reflection of capitalism and the invisible hand doing its free market thing, or is it something else? And then, there's Israel, again.

The best answers get awarded a gold star: ⭐

Perfect answers get two: ⭐⭐

After the rule of law gets vindicated: ‘Complete, dysfunctional chaos’

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of American Indians in a lawsuit claiming that an 1800s Treaty agreement with the US government was being violated in Oklahoma (OK). That sort of thing had been common since the 1800s. US Treaties with Indian tribes, supposedly the law, were being ignored by the US government, including federal courts.  

In a surprise last year, the Supreme Court ruled for Indian tribes in OK, holding that about half the state was Indian territory. That was in accord with existing Treaty law. The non-Indian part of OK was in shock. Indian tribes were happy, to say the least. Non-Indians were in shock.

In his dissent in the 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma case, Chief Justice John Roberts warned that chaos would be the result of the decision. The reason was that many crimes prosecuted by the state of OK would be invalid because they were improperly tried by OK, not the Indian tribes or the federal government. 

Indian territory in Oklahoma

Robert's warning is now playing out. There is much chaos and shock in OK. The Washington Post writes:

Kyle Willis hadn’t seen Kimberly Graham in years, since the day she was sentenced to 107 years in prison after she drunkenly plowed her truck into a group of motorcyclists in Tulsa, killing five people, including his mother and stepfather.

So it was a shock when he saw her at a court hearing last month — tanned, dressed in a frilly purple top and jeans and laughing — a free woman. Graham, who is Native American, was let out of prison in April after a Supreme Court decision last year that found that a large part of eastern Oklahoma is still Indian country. Despite a century of state and local prosecutions, the court ruled that crimes there were the province of federal and tribal courts.

“She’s enjoying life as if nothing ever happened,” said Willis, 34, of Broken Arrow, Okla., who said the sight of Graham left him numb. “It’s bizarre. It’s crazy.”

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma said prosecution of Native Americans for crimes in the expanded Indian country must be carried out in federal and tribal courts, rather than by state or local officials. It was celebrated across the country by Native Americans last July, who saw it as a historic affirmation of treaties signed with the U.S. government in the 1800s.

But in the year since, the ruling has upended Oklahoma’s criminal justice system, imperiled convictions in thousands of cases, sowed confusion for police and emergency responders and led to the direct release of more than 50 criminals convicted on charges including second-degree murder and child abuse, state records show.

A local power plant is challenging an increase in its property taxes. The state is fending off a move by the federal government to strip its ability to regulate mines on Indian land. The state has also raised concerns about a potential loss of tax revenue.

The fallout has exacerbated long-standing tensions between Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and the leaders of five tribes involved. Stitt held a community forum on the issue this month that degenerated into raucous shouting, with attendees booing and chanting, “Treaties are the law of the land!”

“We are living a nightmare out here,” said Ryan Leonard, the Oklahoma governor’s special counsel for Native American affairs. “It’s complete, dysfunctional chaos in the state of Oklahoma.”

The WaPo article goes on to note that OK estimates that up to 79,000 criminal have to be released. About one-fourth of those will probably be re-prosecuted. Since the state has to step back, Indian tribes in OK expanded their legal operations by adding prosecutors, marshals and victims services personnel. So far, the Cherokee Nation recently added six prosecutors, two district court judges and 13 marshals and filed about 1,300 cases this year. 

Not surprisingly, OK sees this as a mess and Indian tribes see it as a great opportunity to assert their long-denied rights. Justice Gorsuch who wrote the 5-4 decision commented: “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise. Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word. Dire warnings are just that, and not a license for us to disregard the law.” 

At least some of Robert's warnings are coming true.

Questions: What is more important, continuing to violate Indian treaties and the rule of law in the name of avoiding legal chaos, or to try to live up to Indian Treaty legal requirements even if it means some chaos and bad outcomes with bad people being let off the hook and out of jail? 

Are the people who allowed Treaty violations to exist in the first place responsible for the chaos now, or are they well-meaning people (or not well-meaning bigots) who committed forgivable mistakes, assuming (i) any of them are still alive, and (ii) there is at least some legal means to hold them accountable? 

Should the Supreme Court take this case up again and rule against the Indian Tribes for convenience or based on new arguments, e.g., the Treaties don't mean what they say, or for some other reason?[1] 

Footnote: 

1. The current Christian nationalist Supreme Court would probably overturn McGirt and go back to the good 'ole days of blowing off Indian Treaties in OK. Jimcy McGirt was convicted in state court and jailed as a child molester. McGirt, argued that the state did not have jurisdiction to prosecute him because he was a Native American on tribal land. There is one (assuming Kennedy was a radical Christian nationalist) or two more radical Christian nationalist judges now on the Supreme Court than there were when McGirt was originally decided.

An alleged source of Republican opposition to cracking down on tax cheats

Tax cheats underpay taxes by an estimated $1 to $1.4 trillion/year. Years ago, conservative anti-Obama and anti-government propaganda argued that Obama weaponized the IRS when Obamacare imposed a tax penalty for not signing up. That appears to be a major part of fascist Republican Party opposition to giving the IRS the budget it needs to collect taxes. So, us honest taxpayers are just suckers because we don't cheat and the fascist GOP (FGOP) has no problem with it, at least not enough to do anything fix the annual festival of tax cheating. The New York Times writes:

A plan by Democrats to pay for infrastructure investments by beefing up the Internal Revenue Service to catch tax evaders has resurfaced old resentments for Republicans, whose distrust of the agency has simmered for years, erasing hopes of a bipartisan legislative accord built on narrowing the so-called tax gap.

Republican senators backed away this week from a provision to toughen tax enforcement at the I.R.S., gutting a crucial source of financing for an infrastructure package that would devote about $600 billion to roads, bridges, broadband and other public goods. That has left lawmakers scrambling to figure out how to pay for the legislation and has again put the I.R.S., whose funding and ability to conduct audits has diminished over the past decade, in limbo.

For conservative activists, who have harbored enmity toward the I.R.S. for more than a decade, the agency is considered a threat that is beyond reclamation.

“As we learned in 2013, Democrats have weaponized the I.R.S. as a political tool, and now they want an even more powerful I.R.S. to target their political enemies just as they did under Obama,” said David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a free-enterprise advocacy group. “Their proposal is not cost effective even by optimistic estimates and it’s just another example of the vicious tactics of the radical socialist left.”  

The tax collection agency was never particularly popular with Republicans, who tend to embrace small government and low taxes. But their animus toward the I.R.S. became more impassioned in 2010, after Democrats and the Obama administration used it as a tool for enforcing the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that everyone buy health insurance.

Also note that the FGOP has got its messaging about Democrats in place and down pat. Almost always these days, Democrats and the Democratic Party are slandered as the radical left, socialist left, radical socialist left or something like that. 

Nothing the Democrats propose to pay for federal spending by collecting taxes owed is socialist. Paying for spending on infrastructure isn't socialist either. The FGOP argument is a red herring used to distract people from inconvenient truths such as (i) the FGOP condones massive tax cheating and has for years, and (ii) the FGOP hates government and (a) wants to starve it to death by cutting off federal revenues as much as possible, and (b) wants to privatize as much government activity as possible in its ongoing push to capture much more power and wealth for powerful and wealthy people, groups and special interests. 

Questions: Is it radical to try to pay for federal spending on infrastructure or to try to reduce tax evasion? Is domestic spending for, e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, social security and infrastructure, all of which the FGOP hates and wants to get rid of, socialist and doomed to fail as inherently flawed central planning? Should the the free market be free to deal with these matters because all socialism always fails and free markets always succeed?

Take next exit -- the off ramp is free and clear

Blog note

My Disqus notifications have almost completely stopped working properly. I need to figure a different way to keep apprised on comments, assuming there is one. That applies to both emails and inbox notifications. Some others are reporting the same problem to Disqus but I don't know when or if the problem will go away. In the meantime, if I don't respond, it is because I'm not getting notices of responses until up to 10 days later.

How political extremists deal with online free speech

This is about a personal online incident from yesterday.

I've mentioned several times here that a few months before the 2020 elections, I started to  engage with seven large pro-T**** online politics sites. All seven wound up blocking me, some starting with my first comment, but none banned outright. My comments just stopped showing up, sometimes labeled as in moderation or being spam checked. The rest with no explanation at all. Clearly, T**** supporters and fascist pro-T**** sites cannot handle, or will not accept, inconvenient facts or sound reasoning.

A couple of days ago, a commenter here cited OffGuardian or OFFG (tagline: Because facts really should be sacred) as an information source. Since that one was new to me, I checked it out. I picked an article, The Propaganda War (And How to Fight It) because I'm interested in fighting propaganda. And, facts really are critically important in defense of good things including democracy, the rule of law and social comity. 

The article turned out to be crackpot conspiracy theory and as deranged and fact-free an attack on the COVID vaccine as anything I've ever seen. It was a based on lies and argument that doesn't even qualify for motivated reasoning. It is almost as false, offensive and socially damaging as anything I encountered on the pro-T**** sites. The recommended anti-vaxx action item was this:

OK, here comes the big idea, which will only work if enough people do it. You probably won’t like it, but what the hell, here goes…

This is the red inverted triangle the Nazis used in the concentration camps to designate their political opponents and members of the anti-Nazi resistance. Make one. Make it out of fabric, paper, or whatever material you have at hand.

Put a big, black “U” in the center of it to signify “Unvaccinated.” Wear it in public, conspicuously.

The article went on to tell people to tell other people why they are wearing the U Nazi symbol in public and to encourage other people to also refuse the vaccine. The article indicates that although this tactic will not work on people who are New Normal segregationists, even those miscreants should also be told to refuse the vaccine. No, I don't know or care what a new normal segregationist is.

Being curious about this site and its loyal followers, I posted this comment: 

People who could but do not get vaccinated are responsible for the deaths and social and economic damage they cause. The evidence is clear that vaccines work and are safe enough to be used to prevent COVID infections or reduce their severity. It is disheartening to see this kind of anti-vaccine disinformation-propaganda being passed as real information. What has happened to the a significant slice of the human race? It’s gone nuts. Facts are lies and lies are facts. Maybe we will self-annihilate. The seeds of it are in our minds. Those seeds are being nurtured by mass disinformation.

Some time later that day (yesterday) I got some responses, all negative. By then, my comment had accumulated 12 downvotes and no upvotes. At the moment it's at 47 down and 0 up. My three attempts to respond yesterday got blocked, allegedly to check for spam. My one attempted one sentence response today is also being checked for spam. I doubt that any will ever be posted. 

From that wonderful encounter, I assumed that OFFG is a far left crackpot and conspiracies site. Having an inquiring mind, off to MBFC I went. Sure enough, it's crackpot in reasoning and sloppy with facts. MBFC comments in its rating of OFFG: "Founded in 2015, the OffGuardian is an independent news and opinion website that “takes its name from the fact its five founders had all been censored on and/or banned from the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ sections.”" Woof! From that, one can tell one that one is dealing with some serious firepower here.

Based on the anti-vaxx article, I would rate OFFG Tin Foil Hat & Quackery, with Very Low fact accuracy and maybe far left extremism (I'm not quite sure about it being far left - it may be too nutty to be categorized in any political scale way). But heck, that's just silly old me, where facts are sacred and so is sound reasoning.  

One can wonder, what sites actually get Tin Foil Hat & Quackery, with Very Low? Those places must be enchanting. But that's for another blog post. But I digress.

In another way, this site is a lot like some of the fascist radical right sites that booted my sorry backside off in 2020. They sanctimoniously bleat that they revere free speech and are open to all ideas, but it just ain't so, i.e., it's a big, fat lie. This is some of the meaningless drivel from the OFFG comment policy page:

OffGuardian has a completely open comment policy. People can post without signing in or confirming their identity.

We have never banned anyone from this site, and unless you are grotesquely racist, abusive or spammy, you will be able to post any shade of opinion you like here.

Please note also that we do have an automated system that holds back any comment containing three or more hyperlinks. This is intended to help filter out spam. If your comment contains three or more hyperlinks it will be held back until we clear it, but it will be published eventually.

None of my comments had three or more hyperlinks. Like with the fascist T**** sites, no one ever openly banned me. My comments just mysteriously failed to appear. Maybe my one allowed comment was grotesquely racist or abusive to OFFG, but it seemed rather mild to me. Or, maybe telling the truth is too abusive. None of my attempted but now blocked responses to people who responded to me has been posted yet. People there responded to me mostly with insults, and/or derision, e.g., liar. On the bright side, they let me post one comment before shutting me down. A couple of the free speech loving, fascist[1] pro-T****  sites would not let me post even one comment.

What a fun place. /sarc 

What an immoral place. /not sarc

Question: In view of the damage to society and democracy that sites like OFFG cause, should their taxable income be taxed at a high rate, or should they be required by law to pay a high monthly or annual license to operate fee, or should they be free to spew their divisive and damaging lies, hate and disinformation regardless of the consequences?

Footnote: 

1. I know, I know. Free speech loving fascist is an oxymoron. Of course, that's not oxymoron if one defines free speech as only what supports fascism and the dictator and its supporting autocracy and kleptocrats.

The Billionaires' Big Lie About Space

The Wrong Stuff 

I'd like to frame this conversation in the terms used in two interviews on MSNBC. The first, by Ari Melber of a sober looking Neil Degrasse Tyson:

ARI MELBER:  I put both questions to you what is the potential public good and research? I know you love research and what about the larger issues of inequality and ethics? 

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:  So we should make a few obvious first points, that there has been inequality and hunger and poor and racism and all these problems all that long predates anybody's attempt to fly in space. So to now look at success in space launches and say because we're doing that is why we have not solved the rest of these problems is kind of a false equivalence. . . In a democracy, an elected republic, we vote every year for representatives to then create a budget of things we value. . . We do things because that's the identity of the country we want to create and we're wealthy enough we can do it all.  So don't just say why are we spending there when we should be spending [ elsewhere ] well let's spend it in both places period.

ARI MELBER:  Now by the way I did the math on this i want to know how rich Jeff Bezos is.  The 200 billion dollars is, at last I checked, his wealth. . .

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: . . . [ He's ] got plenty of money.  He can do that and 20 other things, so if you want to complain about Jeff Bezos, complain that he's not helping the poor the hungry or his workers but that specifically wouldn't have to directly address the fact that he wants to go into space and . . . with Branson [ create ] an entire new [ branch of economics ]. . . This this is America.  If you don't think that it should happen that way, that's a different country. . . 

The second, by Mehdi Hasan of Anand Giridharadas:

MEHDI HASAN:  One estimate suggests Bezos has spent around five billion dollars on his space quest so far, which is also ironically around what he would owe if an Elizabeth Warren style wealth tax were brought in.  He's clearly got the spare change for it.  

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS:  [ What ] we saw today was as you say an advertisement for wealth taxation in America,  and for breaking up these concentrated fortunes.  Because what you saw is literally the money that could have been paid as wages, should have been paid as wages, could have been paid as taxes. . . [ Bezos' fortune comes from ] monopoly money that, you know, wouldn't be there in that amount if it didn't have the abusive and precarious employment practices . . . [ We ] know where that money comes from, it comes from those antisocial and abusive, and frankly, anti-democratic practices. 

And so the money paying for that jet fuel, the money paying for those rockets, the money paying for the PR . . . is the money that properly belongs to Amazon workers and the tax authorities.  And something actually really important happened today on that score, which is of all people on Earth, Jeff Bezos acknowledged that in what might have been a slip of the tongue.  He said Amazon customers paid for this, which is sort of an obvious thing to say, but then he said Amazon workers also funded that.  And that is actually a stunning admission from a CEO [ whose fortune ] . . . is funded by withheld wages.

Even if one agrees with him, no serious person can be anything but embarrassed for Neil Degrasse Tyson.  In one sense I do feel bad for him, as he's an astrophysicist who is clearly out of his depth on economic and historical matters.  Yet however out of his depth he might be, he is both stridently assertive and blithe to the point of being willfully ignorant.  He opens with what is plainly a non-sequitur, as the fact of the problems he describes as existing prior to the space program is irrelevant: money did pre-exist the space program.  Neither is money so abundant that it cannot be said spending more on ICBMs ( an ulterior aim of the Apollo missions ) does not prevent us spending more on education or food stamps.

Ironically Degrasse Tyson complains throughout his interview with the all too sympathetic Ari Melber that the criticisms of Bezos's riches funding a private space program are not serious.  He states, rather flatly, that the American democracy is responsive to voters wishing to reign in the power and wealth of Croesus himself, and that massive inequality is the American way - were it otherwise, it would not be America.  One can't help but wonder if he agrees with Drumpf and Tucker Carlson that Ilan Omar ought to back to the country from which she came.

Where Degrasse Tyson constantly conflates state funding of original science research with three billionaires privatizing the profit from public expenses, Anand Giridharadas makes a cogent and concise repudiation of the entire project.  Bezos's wealth, like Branson's, like Musk's and Suckerberg's and Bill Gates's, is possible only through paying workers less than the post-war average share of GDP.  They can do this because like Bezos and Gates, they headed a monopoly.  Or because like Musk and Suckerberg they were able to capitalize on the work of others, with Musk particularly benefitting from public expenditures.  Now that he's profitable, he of course moves out of a state which has given him millions of taxpayer subsidies because, you know, they'd like to see a small part of that investment returned.

I think Giridharadas makes his point clearly enough that I don't have to dwell on it.  I'd like to bring out another point: these billionaires aren't playing space age Wright brothers because they want to help humanity.  In fact none of these projects will EVER meaningfully affect the lives of 99.9% of all Americans.  They're doing it because they want more.  Picture Christopher Plummer in Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World. 

And that "more" will come in the form of near-future competitions for US Government weapons programs.  This is not about space tourism, as in Degrasse Tyson's adolescent and totally out of touch dreams.  It's about more.

More money, certainly.  But what these neo-aristocrats want more of is control.  Is Gates "giving back" with his investments in failed approaches to education?  Or is he solving problems as he sees fit, because he sees fit to do it?  During the 50s and 60s the "space race" was ultimately about "conquering space," about weaponizing space to threaten terrestrial enemies.  That's still the case today.  But this "race" isn't being run with bland government officials liasing with private companies nobody's ever heard of, such as Thiokol.  However much he profited from his various companies doing military related work, even Howard Hughes was nowhere near as personally associated with the space program of his era than Bezos is today.  Why do you think that is?