The Headline at the Paper of Record is explicit:
Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online.
It’s a good read up to a point. The right wing can’t cope with reality; they can only thrive in a world of alternative facts and lies. The article by Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers (full access with the above link) explains how efforts by the government to control disinformation after January 6 got off to a good start, but has gotten rolled back.
In the wake of the riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, a groundswell built in Washington to rein in the onslaught of lies that had fueled the assault on the peaceful transfer of power.
Social media companies suspended Donald J. Trump, then the president, and many of his allies from the platforms they had used to spread misinformation about his defeat and whip up the attempt to overturn it. The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress and even some Republicans sought to do more to hold the companies accountable. Academic researchers wrestled with how to strengthen efforts to monitor false posts.
Mr. Trump and his allies embarked instead on a counteroffensive, a coordinated effort to block what they viewed as a dangerous effort to censor conservatives.
They have unquestionably prevailed.
It’s good as far as it goes — but it doesn’t go far enough.
It barely mentions how Russia and other foreign actors have used social media to target the U.S. and destabilize it, long before January 6. (Or how Republicans were happy to make use of it when it helped them.) Barely touched on is the role of the extremely wealthy owners of social media — and their agenda.
There’s no mention of how media consolidation has stifled dialog and alternative points of view — or basic investigative reporting for that matter.
There’s no mention of the well-funded efforts by conservative oligarchs to ‘catapult the propaganda’ with think tanks, foundations, targeting colleges and universities, and through the charter school movement. Let’s not forget the Red State legislatures passing restrictive laws of all kinds on what can be taught in schools.
There’s no discussion of the role of ‘news’ organizations that really aren’t — instead they are right wing messaging platforms constantly serving up disinformation. It’s surprising that the case of Fox News being forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for knowingly spreading lies about Dominion voting machines was not mentioned as a case of disinformation — or that it took legal action by a private company to address it, not the government.
Sinclair Broadcasting is not as blatant, but its ownership of tv stations is not entirely benign either. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine has allowed the proliferation of talk radio stations that put out a constant stream of one-sided programming, much of which is disinformation, with a heavy dollop of snake-oil merchandising.
Also not mentioned is the flood of dark money into politics, astroturf groups, and the placement of activist judges throughout the judiciary with a conservative agenda. The article touches on how the right found a judge appointed by Trump who issued a ruling aimed at stopping Biden administration officials from curtailing disinformation about Covid — and used disinformation in his ruling. It’s not the only example.
The efforts of Red State attorney generals to push claims that conservatives are being de-platformed are now before the Supreme Court. The battle is being fought over what constitutes free speech, what responsibility tech companies have to police their platforms, and how much the government should be allowed to regulate. From the BBC:
US Supreme Court justices appeared torn on Monday as they heard a landmark pair of cases which could fundamentally alter the future of online free speech.
At issue were Republican-backed laws passed in Florida and Texas limiting tech firms' ability to remove political content they deem objectionable.
Tech giants said the laws, passed after the 2021 Capitol riot, infringed on their right to editorial discretion.
At times justices seemed unsure of how to apply existing law to tech firms.
(Funny thing about Republican complaints about being de-platformed and cancel culture. Biden’s SOTU was so effective, they’re talking about refusing to invite any future presidents to give it. Of course, we know that only applies to Democratic presidents...)
Finally, let’s not forget how the mainstream media has been cowed by decades of conservatives screaming about “liberal media bias” into bending over backwards to accommodate them. You see it with their constant efforts to push false equivalence. You see it with the way they constantly pick up up, amplify, and retransmit rightwing talking points (Cokie’s Law). You see it with the way the acronyms IOKIYAR and IACIYAD came about.
It’s there in the way things get framed, like President Trump, not former president Trump — or for that matter adjudicated rapist, business fraudster, and criminal defendant Trump, who is out on bail. It’s there in the way “But her emails!” swamped “You can grab them by the pussy!”
It’s also driven by purely economic concerns. As Duncan Black observed long ago, “Information wants to be free — but the rent wants to be paid.” If it bleeds, it leads. If it smells, it sells. There has always been a bias in for-profit journalism, in that if it doesn’t make money, it’s over. But it has gotten worse. PBS has an interview with McKay Coppins detailing how a major hedge fund has been buying up newspapers — and then killing them off.
There’s also the problem that we are still figuring out how freedom of speech works in the age of digital media. Spocko at Digby’s place ponders how Our old metaphors on speech & debate are broken by new tech says Barb McQuade
This quote from Chapter 5 is the set up I still hear from people on the left. I call it the 1st Amendment, “Free Speech” platitude line.
First, our constitutional commitment to free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment and regarded by the left and the right with a near religious reverence. As a result, many of us embrace the view that we would defend the right of our neighbors to express even the most offensive ideas, because their right to express them is essential to democracy. And so with few exceptions people are free to say anything, even if their statements are factually incorrect or, worse, intentionally deceptive.
Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, by Barb McQuade. Chapter 5
It’s the old, “I don’t like what they have to say, but I’ll fight to the death their right to say it!” line.
Very noble! But does that mean you’ll defend to the death the “right” of 5,000 bots out of Russia to amplify intentional lies about our election? What if your “neighbor” is in Lubbock Texas and calls for the killing of election officials AND THEIR KIDS, who live in Arizona? (True story. Texas man sentenced to 3½ years for threatening Arizona election workers, officials)
Interesting times ahead while we figure this out. To quote from the BBC article about the Supreme Court arguments on this topic:
Justice Alito, a conservative member of the court, voiced concern as to whether editorial protections afforded to newspapers were applicable to social media giants. At one point the 73-year-old quipped "if YouTube were a newspaper, how much would it weigh".
UPDATE 3-18-24 4:00pm ET
Digby reminds us of another kind of disinformation — when the media chooses to set up a narrative because reporting the actual truth of the situation would be too upsetting.
She looks back to when media pandemic coverage settled on Trump as taking on the mantle of a wartime president to deal with Covid — just as how the press made George W. Bush into a wartime leader after 911. It’s riffing off a White House tweet reminding us of 4 Years Ago Today. The video clip shows Trump bragging about the great job they were doing; the White House caption on it reminds us of what the actual situation was.
The caption is “Four years ago today, as the pandemic raged on with a shortage of testing supplies due to government inaction, Trump went on national TV to brag about himself: We’re handling this very, very professionally”
Digby goes into more detail, bringing up what she wrote at the time after watching Trump and the press reaction to his attempt to spin what was happening:
I felt a little sense of déjà vu as I read those pieces and watched the media response to Trump’s appearance on Tuesday. It recalled an earlier episode in which a president looked like a deer in the headlights during a crisis and was then elevated to heroic status by the press when he appeared at Ground Zero with a bullhorn and spoke to the assembled rescue workers:
I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!
The ecstatic reaction from the media fully activated the impulse to rally around the president, and that was the end of virtually all skepticism about the American response to the 9/11 attacks for the next year. The media made George W. Bush into a “wartime” leader that day, and granted him all the power that came with it.
We are once again facing a national crisis. This time it’s not just hitting a couple of cities, as devastating as that was. This is affecting everyone in the country. The economic fallout stands to be even worse than the 2008 financial crisis. And once again, you can sense that the media is longing to anoint a leader to perform some ostensibly heroic ritual to make us all feel better.
Digby linked to a NY Times report on just how dysfunctional the Trump White House was in dealing with the crisis, summarizing it as:
According to the New York Times, it’s been an extremely chaotic time with infighting among the various task force members, Jared Kushner stepping all over everyone’s toes and incompetent leadership from the top. In other words, it’s been business as usual in the Trump administration. Unfortunately, this time this bumbling White House is confronting its first real crisis and one of the most serious global challenges in decades.
That was the reality, but after Trump decided to stop telling everyone the pandemic would just fade away and switched to a different tack, the press went right along with it. Digby has several videos, including this 2020 video clip from Dana Bash at CNN showing just how much effort the press put into painting Trump as a heroic leader.
Watch CNN's Dana Bash praise President @RealDonaldTrump's leadership on the coronavirus:
"He is being the kind of leader...that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty."
As Digby notes, But we wonder why people don’t blame Trump for the monumental failure of his COVID response today?
Disinformation comes in many flavors.