Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

As much as street action matters for local organizing battles, the movement left is long overdue for a coming-to-Jesus moment on the fact that digital space is where movement action in general now gets contextualized, understood, and framed.

When I was coming up as an organizer, that contextualization/understanding/framing was very much a function of local press.

Stories *might* get picked up nationally, but almost always they got picked up *from* local outlets that had already done that narrative work.

What that meant in terms of narrative strategy was that you needed a really comprehensive local press list and strong relationships with reporters assigned to cover the beat most closely related to your organizing work.

If you had the relationships you needed to effectively pitch-- and if you had developed enough trust in those relationships to be able to go off-record, give context, and help them understand why movement's framing of the story made factual sense-- you could help guide narrative.

Twitter started out being really important for that narrative work because Twitter was where the journalists were.

Initially, it was a way to build those relationships and also interface with reporters as they talked to each other about how to understand developing stories.

Even at that stage, though, it was *still* about engaging and helping factually inform the way local press/media reported and presented the actions and campaign work you were doing.

As a whole, the movement left has always been pretty slow to develop informed digital strategy, in part because we're relationship-focused and large scale digital strategy (especially on Twitter) has always been more about shallow brand-building than deep relationship-building.

Movement left (especially older school movement left) *has* often been good at building relationships with local press, but as print media has shifted to general assignment models (rather than beats) for a radically-shrunk base of reporters, that's gotten harder and harder to do.

In part because local media just doesn't have the capacity, but also largely because digital space & especially Twitter makes for a quick & distributed narrative shaping (rather than reporting delayed by research/fact-checking), local news doesn't initially shape stories anymore.

In theory, this sounds much more democratic, and like it would give movement folks a strengthened position from which we could guide the narrative without worrying about local press gatekeeping.

That read doesn't account for weaponized disinformation, though.

The big and thorny thing here is, buzz starts to matter more than newsworthiness.

Local reporters are less and less likely to even cover a story if there isn't buzz about it, so you have to get buzz going *before* you're likely to get fact-accountable press coverage.

Getting buzz means making the story relevant, important, and compelling to people.

The more buzz you build for your story, the more it becomes a topic that disinformative bad actors will want to jump on and use to their own ends.

If the story is buzz-y enough, it may appeal to disinformative bad actors well outside your local digital and media environment.

Basically, getting coverage means making your story vulnerable to disinformation before any fact-accountable media coverage happens.

(I say "fact-accountable" not because I trust the media to get shit right, but because press outlets really do still feel some need to maintain an aura of trustworthiness, and are much more likely to respond to pressure when called out for getting facts wrong)

By the time the press gets around to reporting on a buzz-y story, there's *already* a narrative and counter-narrative out there, and any framing they produce is going to be vulnerable to accusations of side-taking.

Reporters tend to over-correct by trying to walk the middle line between the two "sides" of the narrative.

Disinformative efforts, meanwhile, work to skew the narrative in an extreme way, creating a "middle line" that's radically different from the middle line on the ground.

We tend to think of disinformation as being the same as misinformation, but that's not the case.

Misinformation seeks to convince people of a counter-factual truth.

The goal of disinformation is to make people GIVE UP on figuring out the truth.

One thing I've said a lot when I've trained other activists up on media strategy is that-- outside of full-on propaganda outlets like Fox News or (increasingly) MSNBC-- most individual reporters really do want to locate the truth.

That's not to say ALL reporters are agents of truth, but it's my experience that outlet bias tends to come out more through editorial choice (op-eds, and which stories do and don't get assigned) than through individual reporters selectively reporting and/or obscuring reality.

That's bad news for the dogmatic left, which starts from an ideological orthodoxy and defines reality through that lens.

For a movement left that values honesty/truth, though, it's great. If we stick to those values, we have an edge over our dishonest opposition.

Racism is real.

Misogyny is real.

Wealth inequity is real.

Pro-corporate corruption is real.

The whole oppressive hegemony we fight is real.

Our fight is to name and combat that hegemony and its sins, and when we do that the story of our fight is a reality-based narrative.

In the long run, facts are always on the side of liberatory movement.

For that reason, a huge percentage of our work is the work of making sure those facts are highlighted publicly and recognized by as many people as possible.

Effective disinformation always works against us, because effective disinformation leaves people believing that there is no way to tell what the facts actually are, and therefore no reason to bother paying attention to claimed facts, no matter who presents them.

Effective disinformation teaches people to think fact-finding is a hopeless mission, and encourages them to default to their own biases.

Disinformation is all about convincing people to default to their least-informed understanding of reality.

That's what disinformation looks like as a tactic, and even just as a tactic it's clear that disinfo is the enemy of liberatory movement.

The situation is even more dire when we start thinking about WHY disinformation gets deployed, who it serves.

Liberatory movement's most direct enemy are those organized in defense of capital.

(And btw, as much as class reductionists hate to admit it, capital is about a lot more than just money and class. It's about sociopolitical privilege as well.)

Domestically within the US, misinformation tends to serve the interests of these people more than disinformation.

They don't want people to doubt all narratives, they want people to to believe a specific misinformative narrative about how great capitalism is.

Things get a lot more complicated when we zoom out to an international level and start looking at the fact that even capitalist nation-states tend to have competing self-interests, tend to want to advance certain capitalists' interests over others.

When a nation-state favors a set of capitalists that are in conflict with another nation-state's favored set of capitalists, those two nation states will work to undermine each other's self-interests (and, by extension, the self-interests of the capitalists they disfavor).

Dem liberals have definitely made a whole lot of disingenuous hay on "oh Russia did it" stuff in order to excuse themselves from accountability for their fuckups, but it's also deeply destructive to liberatory movement when we assume hostile state disinfo is a thing of myth.

Centrist liberals like to frame Russia stuff with a patriotic gloss and talk about "undermining democracy," but democracy is a secondary target at best.

Russia disinfo attacks on the US are about advancing the interests of Russia's preferred set of predatory capitalists.

The United States government (along with most of its state/local governments) is a deeply corrupt system that largely functions to advance the interests of *its* preferred set of capitalists.

Those US-preferred capitalists thrive when the US citizenry is more or less united in buying the misinfo those US-favored capitalists (and the government they bought) peddle: the false narrative that capitalism lifts all boats and is a good thing for working people.

US-targeted Russian disinfo (and other crony nation-state disinfo in general, but Russia really seems to have the most effective track record) is all about making us believe that we can't believe anything, that everyone is deceiving us, that there is no discernable truth.

It's a knife aimed at the throats of the capitalist US interests that Russia wants to undermine, but it cuts liberatory movement deeply.

Our big advantage is that our enemies are liars and that facts are on our side.

If no one believes in facts, though, we lose that advantage.

Liberatory movement only succeeds if we help lead people to the truth about capitalism.

It only succeeds if they believe we can DO something to defeat capitalism.

The purpose of disinformation is to create a general sense that everyone is lying, to make people feel hopeless & angry, & convince us we can't trust anyone.

That's why disinfo is so linked to accelerationism; people start to believe that the only way out is burning it all down.

Nazis, in their heart of hearts, are always to some degree accelerationists.

Some may want to seize buildings rather than burn them down, but the underlying philosophy is always one of acceleration of and deepening of existing structural oppressive violence.

In Nazi Germany, they led with the acceleration and deepening of antisemitic violence.

In the US, they lead with the acceleration and deepening of racist and xenophobic violence.

Always, though, acceleration/deepening of oppressive violence is a primary hallmark of fascism.

There are fucking endless chicken-and-egg debates about US far right extremism and disinformation, but the truth of the matter is, these are co-constituting phenomena.

Disinfo artists and Nazis and fascists feed off each other and often wear each others' hats.

I started this thread thinking about Andy Ngo and the way he's distorted discourse around the protests over the murder of George Floyd, and he's a great example of how these lines blur.

Andy's a disinformation artist who is part of an extended disinformation network with strong links to Russia.

He's also a fucking Nazi and just great pals with a ton of Nazis who couldn't care less about Russia.

Is Andy a "Russian disinformation op"?

Is he a fucking Nazi who just takes advantage of existing Russian disinfo resources/networks to push his Nazi agenda?

To some extent both/and, but who knows how conscious any of this shit is.

There's this one Nazi I've watched very clearly laundering (bad) Russian disinfo memes on Telegram for the better part of the year and pushing co-constitutive memes with channels that are extremely obvious outlets for Russian disinfo about Syria and Ukraine.

Honest to God, I think he was probably just mad about some people linked to Ukraine's Azov militia and pushed out "Ukraine is a Jewish conspiracy" memes for a while just to make them look bad.

I don't think he gives a fuck about helping Russia in any real way.

Hell, I'm not even sure I believe he's smart enough to *realize* he was functioning as a means to launder Russian anti-Ukraine memes into accelerationist neo-Nazi community.

It would take two strokes of this guy's ego to convince him it was all just run-of-the-mill trolling.

Disinfo pushes people towards accelerationist thinking.

Nazis are always to at least some degree accelerationists.

It's not surprising that Nazis like/push/eat up Russian disinfo, and it also doesn't mean Russia created contemporary US Nazi accelerationism.

Liberatory movement is about intersectionality, which means it's about recognizing and honoring the complicated ways in which oppressions intersect.

Any movement or politics that affirms and embraces even one oppression is anti-liberatory, & therefore in conflict with our work.

Disinformation almost always appeals to some aspect of oppressive tendency, because that's where people tend to be willfully ignorant.

For that reason, disinformation almost always pushes people to ignore/deny the realities that liberatory movement works to expose.

Disinformation is most effective when it's opportunistic-- when it leaps on any buzz-y story that engages with its focus (which is, again, almost always a focus on reinforcing oppressive ignorance).

The stories of liberatory movement are always going to be stories that lift up the issue of oppressive ignorance and its repercussions, which means our stories are always going to be stories that disinformation agents will see as opportunities to seed disinformation.

We have to make our stories buzz-y to get any sort of fact-accountable media coverage, but that also means that to get that coverage we have to generate a buzz that attracts disinfo agents around stories that are their very favorite sort of stories to prey on.

The dirtbag left is small, but part of the reason it's been so effective is that it is skilled at generating buzz around stories that relate to widespread economic anxiety while also actively engaging & enabling disinfo agents that use those narratives to push oppressive disinfo.

Dirtbags only care about the economic aspect of oppression, so as long as disinfo narratives limit their encouragement of oppression to other oppressions (especially racism and misogyny), dirtbags are still happy to engage & push narratives that have started to encompass disinfo.

Again, I don't think much of this is conscious-- in fact, I think a good chunk of dirtbags are sincere in their belief that disinfo and especially Russian disinfo is some liberal centrist boogeyman.

(And to be fair, liberal centrists have done a good job making it look that way)

As an end result, though, we still end up seeing even relatively-mainstream dirtbag "left" celebrities "ironically" propagating and sharing conspiracy theories like or adjacent to 5G, pizzagate, QAnon, evil Gates vaxx stuff, and other formerly far right narratives.

We see spaces like /stupidpol, where class reductionist dirtbaggers and Nazi openly engage with, share ideas with, and recruit each other, building a shared culture that deeply engages disinformative narratives.

But because the party line on the left right now is basically "disinfo doesn't exist and if it does it isn't that big a deal," there's zero engagement with or discussion of the fact that the "left" is increasingly becoming a vector for racist/anti-semitic accelerationist disinfo.

The reality is, disinformation artists are years ahead of liberatory movement when it comes to understanding how information gets framed, understood, and spread in a digital era where media reports almost always arrive on the scene only AFTER initial framing has taken place.

Disinfo artists like Ngo understand that by pairing a big network of Twitter bots and trolls with a whitewashing apparatus of faux-news sites, they can establish a popular and even a "media" narrative before any fact-accountable media outlets report anything.

Ngo and other (usually more subtle) disinfo artists manufacture their own stories wholecloth when necessary, but even more often will jump on race-related stories of liberatory movement (say, cops murdering a Black man) & frame them disingenuously before facts are ever reported.

Increasingly, dirtbags have let themselves become part of a complementary apparatus that jumps into the fray to mock critics naming the disinformative dynamic & also to do their very best to undermine anyone naming the racism, because naming racism undermines class reductionism.

Disinfo artists like Ngo have well-oiled machines meant to quickly move far right conspiracy theory out of the Nazi swamp and into supposedly fact-accountable, pre-fact check journalist discourse (Jake Tapper's outrage over Ngo's fake milkshake injury is a perfect example).

The mikshake story, however, is a clear example largely because it's an instance of Ngo practicing MISinfo, not disinfo.

The milkshake injury was a misinformative lie. It's easy to confront, because it can be shown as false.

Disinfo, on the other hand, is fuzzy and a lot less tangible.

It's not about purported fact, it's about making it impossible to believe the truth is ascertainable.

It's about getting us to throw up our hands and say, who knows.

The best example I can think of re: disinfo is the narrative around literally the existence OF disinfo.

We all know bots exist, that they come from somewhere, that Russia is linked to some sketchy stuff, but most of it is almost impossible to prove one way or another.

The best we can do most of the time is show the corkboard-and-string of relationship and be like "clearly something is fishy here," which disinfo agents and denialists will always look at and be like "conspiracy theory."

And it's hard to blame folks for believing them, because disinfo agents constantly throw around their own corkboard-and-string diagrams, and from the outside it's almost impossible not to look at both sets of data and be like "they all look like Glenn Beck chalkboards to me."

Liberatory movement is going to have to stop entertaining the romantic belief that working people still live in some fictional analog world of factories and newsie-delivered stories and rotary phones, and understand that we have to organize in the world we live in.

One shitty thing about internalized classism is that most people (including working people) like to imagine they are more informed, educated, and digitally active than working people.

People like to imagine our life online is a edified exception, not the rule.

Newsflash: everyone is online, especially now.

Disinformation isn't a niche problem. It's an everyone problem.

The working class isn't sitting in a bar that time forgot waiting for the local five o'clock news to tell them what's up.

Even if they WERE, even if they were buying papers from 80 y.o. newsies on the corner & waiting for the TV news to tell them what to think, the stories they'd be consuming would *already* be influenced by online discourse and influenced by disinfo.

News works that way now.

Right now, liberatory movement has almost zero effective immune system against disinfo (antifascists are a notable and awesome exception).

We worry about "dividing" the left and stay silent when dogmatic class reductionists cite/further disinfo that fits their narrow lens.

If we don't get our shit together, recognize that the digital is where our stories live and die, and start having serious conversations about how we counter disinformation strategies that warp and hijack and undermine our framing and work, we're going to keep losing.

As long as liberatory movement remains uncomfortable aggressively approaching the digital as an increasingly critical arena for our campaign and organizing work, we are going to stay isolated and appear irrelevant.

Direct relationship-building will *always* be the cornerstone of effective liberatory movement, but campaigns are how we create space to invite people into that relationship-building work.

If we aren't smart and savvy about how we move those campaigns in the public eye, that invitation to relationship building will never get heard.

And if we let racist disinfo assholes use our campaigns to push their own invitations and silence ours, we're worse than screwed.

COVID has pushed nearly everything online at the moment.

If even in this unprecedented moment we can't understand the incredible importance of the digital as a narrative arena and recognize our opponents within it, I'm pessimistic about our ability to grasp this reality ever.

If we leave confrontation of disinfo to national security experts and MSNBC, the only aspects of disinfo that will ever end up confronted are the aspects *they* see as injurious.

They don't care about the injuries we incur.

They won't worry about preventing them.

If we don't protect ourselves, no one will.

Disinfo is a threat to liberatory movement, however inconvenient and messy a truth that may be.

We need to get better about recognizing it, and we need to get better about combatting it.

Otherwise, we're just volunteering to lose.