Thread by @docrussjackson

The UK & USA are in the middle of a catastrophic public-health crisis caused by #coronavirus.

They are also in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral #disinformation, defined as falsehoods aimed at achieving a political goal.

nytimes.com/2020/10/13/mag…

The conspiracy theories, lies, distortions, the overwhelming amount of information & the anger encoded in it all serve to create chaos & confusion and make people, even nonpartisans, exhausted, skeptical & cynical about politics.

But the deliberate & relentless spewing of falsehoods isn’t meant to win any 'battle of ideas'.

Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought, by causing us to simply give up.

And it's not just social media & the web more generally: effective #disinformation campaigns are often an “elite-driven, mass-media led process” in which “social media played only a secondary & supportive role.”

cyber.harvard.edu/people/ybenkler

Censorship of Government critics is for authoritarian regimes.

But a different kind of threat is doing great damage to political, journalistic & scientific discourse: the mass distortion of truth & overwhelming waves of speech from extremists designed to smear & distract.

Along with #disinformation campaigns, there is the separate problem of “troll armies” — a flood of commenters, sometimes propelled by bots — that “aim to discredit or to destroy the reputation of disfavored speakers and to discourage them from speaking again".

Demagogic leaders or movements can use #propaganda.

A crude authoritarian censors free speech. A clever one invokes it to play a trick, twisting facts to turn a mob on a subordinated group &, in the end, silence as well as endanger its members.

Exploring the rise of #fascism & the #Holocaust, Hannah Arendt focused on the use of #propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, & trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”

Unfortunately, 'good ideas' clearly & demonstrably do not necessarily triumph in 'the marketplace of ideas'.

The last few years have proven time & time again that “free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing".

In the #USA, instead of “radicals, artists & activists, socialists & pacifists, the excluded & the dispossessed,” the First Amendment now serves “authoritarians, racists & misogynists, Nazis & Klansmen, pornographers & corporations buying elections.” - Catherine McKinnon, 2018.

In the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration waived rules that barred a single entity from owning a TV station & a daily newspaper in the same local market, to allow Rupert Murdoch to own newspapers after he bought his first broadcast TV stations in New York and Boston.

The F.C.C. repealed the fairness doctrine, which had required broadcasters to include multiple points of view, in 1987. “When that went, that was the beginning of the complete triumph, in media, of the libertarian view of the First Amendment".

The Fox News Effect: after a local cable system adds Fox News, voters in the vicinity tend to shift toward Republican candidates. Communities with higher numbers of Fox News viewers are less likely to comply with stay-at-home orders to fight coronavirus.

nber.org/papers/w12169

A cable network broadcast a conspiracy theorist accusing Fauci of manufacturing #COVID19.

When the segment drew criticism, the company said it was “a supporter of free speech & a marketplace of ideas & viewpoints, even if incredibly controversial.”

Online, Facebook came under intense criticism for the role it played in the last presidential race.

During the 2016 campaign, Facebook later reported, Russian operatives spent about $100,000 to buy some 3,000 ads meant to benefit Trump largely by sowing racial division.

The Trump-aligned group FreedomWorks, seeded by the Koch brothers, promoted Facebook ads directing people to a page with a misleading pic of LeBron James, repurposed to deceive people into thinking he was discouraging voting by mail & widely disseminated.

washingtonpost.com/politics/disin…

In August, NBC News reported on a series of viral tweets that appeared to be from Black men who said they were lifelong Democrats & planned to leave the party.

The accounts were fake.

Twitter eventually took them down. 

nbcnews.com/tech/security/…

Breitbart News remains a "news partner" with Facebook despite sharing a video in which doctors called hydroxychloroquine “a cure for #COVID19 & said “you don’t need a mask", getting more than 20 million views in several hours before Facebook removed it.

buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…

In 2019, Facebook’s head of elections integrity resigned after failing to persuade the company to combat misinformation in political ads & calling on the company to stop profiting “from providing politicians with potent information-warfare tools.”

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/1…

“The Nazis & others were originally elected. In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas. It’s because of the different democratic ethos of Europe that Europe has accepted more restrictions on speech.”

A Russian hack in 2017, two days before a national election, saw thousands of emails leaked from Macron's En Marche!

But the French media did not cover them as the hack had “the obvious purpose of undermining" the election & there is Fox News or Breitbart equivalent in France.

Conspiracies & falsehoods about the #coronavirus & other health issues circulated on Facebook far more frequently than posts by authoritative sources like WHO: the US accounted for 89% of the comments, likes & shares of false & misleading health info".

secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/fa…

There are plenty of ideas that seek to improve the online speech environment: break up the big tech companies; ban microtargeted political ads; require disclosure of the ad buyers; make the platforms file reports detailing when they remove content or reduce its spread.

Trump has trapped the USA in a web of lies, with the sole purpose, it seems, of remaining in office.

Is the American way of protecting free speech actually keeping anyone free or protecting democracy?

Not imho.

Hannah Arendt was a Jewish intellectual who saw the Nazis rise to power by demonizing & blaming Jews & other groups.

The ideal subject of #fascist ideology was the person “for whom the distinction between fact & fiction, & the distinction between true & false, no longer exist.”

This THREAD on #freespeech & #disinformation is a summary of the excellent @nytimes article below, by @emilybazelon, the Truman Capote fellow for creative writing & law at Yale Law School & author of the book “Charged”, which won the LA Times Book Prize.

nytimes.com/2020/10/13/mag…

And in case you're not already sufficiently disturbed by the rapid decline of our fragile democracies, here's a THREAD about the 0.001% driving this utter catastrophe for the 99%.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1316654443836866560

And here's a short film asking: "Is #QAnon a game gone wrong?" from @FT Film.

ft.com/video/372cac40…