Who Watches the Watchmen? Assessing the Mis- and Disinformation Police
In October of last year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) ran an article entitled “Disinformation is a growing crisis. Governments, business[es] and individuals can help stem the tide.” This was just the latest of many of these types of pieces that have argued that alleged disinformation is “cast[ing] doubt [into] everything from corporate brands to individual citizens, public health to election results.” As such, according to the author of the article, governments must “enact far-reaching regulations” that would include requiring “big tech to more strictly police their platforms for hate speech, disinformation, and harmful material.”[1]
Where This All Started
Much of the outcry around internet disinformation began in the aftermath of the 2016 election in the United States (U.S.) in which Donald Trump – the outsider candidate – managed to pull off arguably the biggest upset in the history of U.S. presidential elections by defeating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.[2] Secretary Clinton in her first remarks in the aftermath of her loss in December of 2016 spoke out against what she called “an epidemic” of fake news which needed to be eradicated by governments in order to “protect democracy and innocent lives.”[3]
Claims of this sort have become increasingly common and individuals who make such claims often cite the 2016 election as key evidence that disinformation campaigns can have destabilizing impacts on countries’ systems of government. For example, in 2018 the WEF in the lead up to elections in Latin America put out a press release with the headline “Fake News Poses a Threat to Democracies across Latin America and Worldwide.” The WEF explained that “Fake news and the rapid dissemination of misinformation, particularly online, are a potential threat to democracies and upcoming elections.” They go on to say, “From alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential elections and the UK Brexit referendum… the world is seeing an industrial machine that feeds fake news through democratic processes.”[4]
As though answering the call from leaders like Secretary Clinton, a bevy of organizations and teams have been created to police debate on the internet for information that is deemed incorrect or misleading. In a recent report posted on journalist Matt Taibbi’s Substack Racket News, Schmidt et al. (2023) describe a remarkably complex web of entities that work to pressure big tech companies to stem the tide of alleged mis- and disinformation. These groups work within the government at places like the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and State Department, as well as outside the government at non-profits, for-profit organizations, academic-based groups, think tanks, fact checking outfits, non-governmental organizations, and foundations[5]
Pushback to the Censorship Apparatus
Of course, this changing digital environment has not come without significant pushback. Government organizations working in concert with private entities to police speech online raises an obvious first amendment concern. In Missouri vs. Biden, a case brought before a Federal court in Missouri, two states as well as a series of prominent epidemiologists including Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff sued the government over its censorship of information related to the COVID-19 pandemic.[6] Earlier this month, the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, stating that the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”[7]
If all of this seems both confusing and distressing to casual observers, it should, as it may initially seem as though free societies are at a crossroads at which they are being forced to choose between free speech rights and the stability of their systems of government. However, free speech rights and government stability are likely not nearly as in conflict with one another as advocates for mass censorship are suggesting. In fact, such censorship policies themselves might pose a far greater threat to democracy and its institutions as we know them.
As such, it is important to take a step back and empirically assess the foundational claim that led to the growth in the number of organizations calling for more invasive censorship policies: was the U.S. presidential election decided by foreign interference through the use of disinformation campaigns?
In a paper published in January of this year in the journal Nature Communications, researchers Eady et al. (2023) studied the impact of Russian disinformation on potential voters and their voting habits. Examining almost 1,500 U.S. voters’ Twitter profiles and their tweets as well as analyzing their answers to survey questions, the authors of the study ascertained the extent to which exposure to known Russian government-controlled accounts influenced U.S. Twitter users’ voting decisions. First, they found that just 1 percent of the users studied accounted for 70 percent of the total exposure to Russian accounts. Second, the exposure was heavily concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans and thus who were already very likely to vote for Donald Trump. Finally, they found that the exposure to these accounts was overshadowed by domestic sources of information. As such, the authors conclude that there was “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaigns and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”[8]
Beyond the empirical question, one wonders as a practical matter whether the supposed watch guards (the government and non-government entities policing speech) themselves are capable of seeing beyond their own biases in determining what exactly is objectively true. According to an analysis conducted by the Washington Free Beacon of so-called “fact checkers”, nearly 100 percent of their political donations went to Democrats.[9] As an example of an article where one may see this bias in action – in a piece bemoaning the recent ruling in Missouri vs. Biden, two New York Times reporters attempted to discredit the judge overseeing the case, Judge Terry A. Doughty, as a partisan who himself fell for online misinformation, writing:
“And it is being overseen by Judge Terry A. Doughty, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump and has previously expressed little skepticism about debunked claims from vaccine skeptics. In one previous case, Judge Doughty accepted as fact the claim that ‘Covid-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease’”.[10]
The only problem with that description, of course, is that the statement “Covid-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease” ultimately did, in fact, prove to be true.[11],[12]
Moreover, it remains unclear whether the consumption of fake information necessarily creates more damage to civic trust relative to the consequences of scattershot censorship efforts employed by the supposed authorities on the matter.
For example, in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election, at the request of now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell organized the writing of a letter by over 50 prominent intelligence officers to discredit the New York Post story about the laptop of then-candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”[13] Later when asked why he organized the letter, Director Morell replied, “Because I wanted [Biden] to win the election.”[14]
This move undertaken by tech companies and intel officers had a severe impact on civic trust. Whether justified or not, according to one poll over 80 percent of Americans believe that the 2020 election would have had a different result had that story been disseminated widely to the public.[15]
Misinformation as a National Security Threat?
Still, proponents of greater censorship would argue that as imperfect as these arbiters might be, ignoring these online campaigns is irresponsible, pointing to real world victims of these campaigns. In this sense, misinformation is seen as a national security threat that inflames dangerous elements of society. In one report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point on online radicalization, the authors explain how “disinformation narratives motivate extremists and radicalize individuals to carry out acts of violence, including those targeting critical infrastructure.”[16]
But how many attacks have actually been carried out by extremists due to online “disinformation narratives”? FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed last August that investigations into far-right terrorism have “more than doubled.”[17] Yet in a recent investigation into the FBI’s claims, journalists Madeleine Rowley and Alex Gutentag looked more deeply into claims of accelerating violence. They note that while the FBI’s domestic terrorism-related investigations have increased by 357 percent, there was no increase in terrorist attacks during that period. For the entire year, homicides linked to white supremacists totaled 21 in the entire country. To put this in perspective, in Chicago alone, there are 58 homicides each month. Beyond overstating the threat, the journalists find that the FBI is embedding confidential informants into these far-right groups who are then encouraging members to engage in illegal activity.[18]
While much of this may seem bizarre or conspiratorial on its face, related tactics were also utilized in the aftermath of 9/11 during the War on Terror in an effort to supposedly stop potential terrorist attacks at the hands of alleged radicalized Muslim Americans.[19] A study in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology by Jesse J. Norris and Hannah Grol-Prokopczyk looked at the frequency with which the FBI used these tactics and their efficacy. The authors found that more than half of all terrorism prosecutions involved the use of paid informants working with the FBI. Of all cases involving FBI informants with supposed jihadi defendants, only a mere 5 percent posed a real threat.[20] Put another way – 95 percent of individuals prosecuted with the help of FBI informants never posed any real threat in committing a terrorist act.
The War on Terror is a useful analogue to our current debate about mis- and disinformation because concerns about regime stability and civilian safety ultimately led to a massive expansion of state powers. Many of the awesome powers that were conferred onto security state agencies during this period originated with the signing of the Patriot Act in 2001. While the country was understandably willing to surrender some of its civil liberties due to rational concerns about safety, many of these powers intruded heavily on personal freedom and didn’t even succeed in their goals. For example, through the Patriot Act, FBI agents could gain access to individuals’ phone and computer records, credit history, and banking history without any judge’s approval using what are known as “National Security Letters” (NSLs). At the height of the War of Terror between 2003 and 2006, 192,499 NSLs were issued by the FBI, resulting in only one terror-related conviction. In that one case, the conviction would have occurred even without the use of an NSL.[21]
Embracing a Principles-Based Approach
In Federalist 51, James Madison provides the key exposition for the need for checks and balances due to the ease with which human beings can be corrupted. He explains,
“It may be a reflection on human nature, that [constitutional rights] should be necessary to control abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary…A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”[22]
There may occasionally seem to be compelling reasons to breach constitutional protections for reasons related to safety or otherwise, but what if these rights are never returned once surrendered during moments of crisis? For example, despite the rampant use of NSLs during the War on Terror having no discernible benefit in fighting terrorism, the government is still permitted to use NSLs today. Over 300,000 of them have been issued in the past 10 years alone.[23]
This example reflects the broader, problematic feature of government agencies. Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University security expert Amy Zegart wrote about this phenomenon in her 1999 book Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JSC, and the NSC. She explains:
“Bureaucrats… have interests of their own and some powerful weapons to pursue them. Whether this means ensuring their organization’s survival, maintaining professional norms or advancing certain policy goals, agencies often behave in ways that legislators and presidents never intended. Whatever the specific aim, bureaucrats tend to enjoy two distinct advantages over other political actors: information and expertise. Presidents and legislators may come and go, but civil servants do not… Even those who argue that Congress ‘controls’ the bureaucracy concede that control is inherently problematic.”[24]
With this in mind, there is an ever-present need for vigilance and caution when citizens are considering surrendering rights of any sort to unelected bureaucrats. As Zegart explains, these agencies can develop institutional incentives of their own, and these aims often include furthering the respective agency’s power and influence.
There was arguably a compelling interest in the War on Terror surveillance in wanting to ensure security agencies had the necessary tools to pursue foreign terrorist suspects.[25] But in the case of today’s push for censorship, what is the compelling interest exactly? There seems to only be endless downsides for the broader public. Firstly, there has yet to be any evidence that the 2016 U.S. election – or any Western election for that matter – was “destabilized” due to foreign disinformation campaigns. Further, it has not been demonstrated that any of the supposed censorship advocates are better than anyone else at policing what information is objectively true and that which is not.
We have for the purposes of this piece focused almost entirely on the censorship of information that officials have alleged is objectively untrue, but recent evidence has shown that these efforts have not stopped there. For example, in the lead up to the 2020 election, the “Virality Project” – a coalition of academic institutions led by Stanford University – worked with Twitter and several government agencies to designate a series of true news stories related to vaccine injuries as being “misinformation” since they were considered “true stories that could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy”.[26]
If anything, the censorship efforts have themselves proven to be just as harmful if not worse to civic trust and ultimate outcomes than random false information on the internet. Specifically, if arguments about the costs and dangers of COVID lockdowns had been open and accessible, perhaps the US would not have pursued such disastrous policies.
America and other Western countries find themselves potentially hurdling toward a future in which the Federal government becomes a real-life version of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth”, which determines what we are permitted to find correct and accurate. It is with this in mind the public must force government actors to return to a principles-based system that prioritizes constitutional rights over that which is politically expedient.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/how-to-address-disinformation/
[2] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/election-results-2016-clinton-trump-231070
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/politics/hillary-clinton-fake-news-epidemic/index.html
[4] https://www.weforum.org/press/2018/03/fake-news-poses-a-threat-to-democracies-across-latin-america-and-worldwide/
[6] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-key-ruling-against-social-media-censorship-missouri-v-biden-government-covid-9b457364
[7] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.293.0_1.pdf, pg. 2.
[8] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9#Sec9
[9] https://freebeacon.com/media/fact-check-nearly-100-percent-of-political-contributions-from-fact-checkers-go-to-democrats/
[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/us/politics/social-media-ruling-government.html
[11] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/07/30/1022867219/cdc-study-provincetown-delta-vaccinated-breakthrough-mask-guidance
[12] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/vaccines-never-prevented-transmission-covid-alex-gutentag
[13] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276
[14] https://nypost.com/2023/04/20/biden-campaign-pushed-spies-to-write-false-hunter-laptop-letter/
[15] https://nypost.com/2022/08/26/2020-election-outcome-would-differ-with-hunter-biden-laptop-coverage-poll/
[16] https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-targeting-of-infrastructure-by-americas-violent-far-right/
[17] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Testimony%20-%20Wray%20-%202022-08-04.pdf, pg. 2.
[19] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/magazine/fbi-international-terrorism-informants.html
[20] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26402433
[21] https://www.aclu.org/surveillance-under-patriot-act-infographic-text
[22] Hamilton, Alexander, et al. “Federalist No. 51.” The Federalist Papers, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2009, p. 264.
[23] https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters/faq#:~:text=NSLs%20are%20used%20to%20obtain,telephone%2C%20and%20Internet%20usage%20records.
[24] Zegart, Amy B. “Toward a Theory of National Security Agencies.” Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, CA, 2000, p. 16.
[25] See John Yoo in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124770304290648701
[26] https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/17/twitter-files-covid-19-misinformation-censorship-virality-project/
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