IMPORTANT THREAD ON DISINFO: I have working class roots. First hand knowledge of how difficult it is for working & vulnerable unemployed people to make improvements to their position. My attempts to understand power, both concrete and informational & how it shapes organization
of our world led me directly to study sociology, politics, international relations and propaganda as a positive/negative force. I needed to understand why people think and do as they do. My values preceded my education, as experiences of being rich and poor... that gulf
and differing cultures led me to be drawn toward left politics, social justice. I support the underdog our government should protect, I don’t support ignorance. I admire left wing intellectuals who have defined our thought on the basis of evidence... public scholarship.
Facts should underlie but are NOT perceptions and beliefs. You can’t grab the most exciting breaking comment that challenges (or supports!) the prevailing narrative and take a counter-establishment argument (because you’re a rebel) and say that necessarily makes you ‘left’.
I am not a ‘liberal’ in the American sense, nor a centerist. I voted for Corbyn, I believe in his domestic (not foreign) policies but was disappointed in him - I support traditional Labour Party causes like the NHS, the welfare state... equality...
I have been homeless. Poor. No one rises from that because they’re gifted, safety nets and good communities are essential. I say this because I want to make clear where I stand when I ...
...say I am incredibly concerned about the number of people on the academic and political left who are spreading literally anything ‘anti-establishment’ without thought and not being discerning about checking accuracy...
- The left is only better if it is evidentially robust, factually superior. Without consideration for the way power is distributed and abused internationally AND in our own country - without understanding of power’s abuses globally we do not understand power...
Concern about 9/11 response or Iraq lies do not mean everything we hear is a lie. The world is not black & white - indeed whatever claims it is may be dirty too. As someone in DC, who knows people who ‘do’ that propaganda deliberately - I was dismayed to receive emails and posts
from academic left wing lists claiming ‘false flag’ operations on Jan 6. Things I saw in Russian propaganda and US white nationalist outlets defending Trump on grounds ‘the establishment’ are corruptly trying to get rid of him, I have watched reproduced spreading nonsense in
left wing UK outlets. Tony Benn would be appalled. I also see mainstream outlets that refused to acknowledge western governments produce propaganda. Our media refusal to focus on anything but threat of foreign propaganda means they fail to scrutinise government.
Disagreement about the principles that organise society should not determine what we consider facts. And the left should be better than this. We need proper scrutiny not zealots.
Opinion is not fact. Academics especially should do better - what I saw on an academic list organised by supposedly left wing academics in the days following Jan 6 made me incredibly upset. I’ve been worried for a while.
I believe strongly in academic freedom. I shall not reveal the identity of anyone but I share below an image not identifying its author. I want the left to think about it’s fuller interrogation of facts not opinion, because we should be succeeding politically and we are not.
And this is not helping. Nor is exclusion from the mainstream media of criticism of ‘the establishment’ or concerns of those who might disagree (with me!) that the Russian Federation is threatening us - but we threaten ourselves.
We have to come together in our common understanding of power and lawbreaking. We cannot do that without a shared factual basis. The mass insurrection of the US Capitol building which - I just lived through!!
...and which EVEN people I know who work doing right wing propaganda creating narratives about Antifa and who still support Trump tell me they accept that Neo-Nazi Oathkeepers were organising not Antifa. Despite the BS..
Come on lefties we are better than this... (anything identifiable redacted here) - from 8 Jan - no evidence provided for any of this of course. Some share false claims about the coronavirus, academics- academic freedom is important to protect but not abuse.
The saddest thing is the lack of counter argument this received.
This does not represent academia. But the failure to call it out is an embarrassment.

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More from @EmmaLBriant

6 Feb
There’s an unhelpful myth that people who believe in conspiracy theories must be stupid or uneducated. Such theories offer complex explanations for skeptical people about forces that feel outside our control. CTs industrial exploitation for political advantage is a major threat.
The problem is more complicated than education or corrections of individual facts. The main reason they are becoming such a problem presently is because they are being deliberately exploited by the influence industry for political actors and monetised for engagement by platforms.
Many false myths out there astrology for example, are limited in harm. Key questions are ‘at what point do conspiracy theories become harmful?’ The organized deliberate use & development of such theories should focus concern, esp mobilising violence. Not false beliefs as such.
Read 5 tweets
26 Jan
This raises real concerns about how robust the US investigation into Russia and #CambridgeAnalytica was. Appalling they did not ask for the data they needed to investigate then stated they could not get this from UK authorities!!!!
I just want to call attention to impt role of #AU student @zamaanq47 here - after I revealed that @ICONews had quietly abandoned their long-awaited final report on #CambridgeAnalytica, we chased @commonsDCMS & he was successful in pressing them to get Denham to speak today!
@zamaanq47 @ICOnews @CommonsDCMS Everyone should give him a follow as he's very good at compiling and communicating the unfolding information from the community working on this subject.
Read 4 tweets
26 Jan
IMPORTANT - Elizabeth Denham from @ICOnews just responded to question I’ve been asking re senate intelligence committee report into Russia vol 5 statement they couldn’t get #Cambridgeanalytica emails from UK authorities- they did NOT ask her and she WILL provide if they ask (!)
WHY DID THEY NOT ASK?!!!!
This is incredible not to mention they appear to have shifted blame for non investigation onto UK failure to provide data, which did not happen. The Biden administration must now properly investigate events that ushered in the Trump age which culminated in a violent insurrection!
Read 8 tweets
24 Jan
As I’ve said before re Benkler et al Harvard study (which was widely used to dismiss #CambridgeAnalytica’s impact) it had valuable findings re insular ideological media but fails to understand relationship & coordinated strategy between social and legacy media in a campaign. Image
It’s not helpful to engage in this debate over what’s more important- social media or legacy forms of media now, it fails to understand the related roles they play. Both are important, and also important to each other.
It’s how they interact and are relatedly used that matters.
Read 6 tweets
17 Oct 20
It’s good to see the media discussing possibility of coordination during the #brexit campaign again as more documents come out. This significance was unspoken in a lot of reporting on whether #CambridgeAnalytica worked on LeaveEU after @carolecadwalla and my evidence raised it.
Now people are seeing more of what the #CambridgeAnalytica scandal was about. The #scandal which spun off from it subsumed so much of the media attention it’s been difficult to get across other parts of the scandal. I discuss it all in my upcoming book see propagandamachine.tech
The media have done a MASSIVE injustice to Britain, America and the rest of the world in propagating the myth that #CambridgeAnalytica was just about the #Facebook scandal. This vital interpretation is in my upcoming book and I illustrate global reach here propagandamachine.tech
Read 5 tweets
12 Oct 20
BREAKING My article with @OCCRP on #Emic, spun off from #cambridgeanalytica parent company SCL - it continued work for governments shaping the future of global influence operations amid ongoing investigations @carolecadwalla @peterjukes @AndreaChalupa @DamianCollins @BardCollege
Training from #Emic may include the familiar faces including Nigel “no company’s whiter than white” Oakes - see my parliamentary evidence from 2018, here he is discussing how Hitler didn’t have a problem with the Jews...
Apparently these are trainers delivering methods that governments such as Canada and the Netherlands were happy to ignore the past history of unethical use to obtain. We must demand more of governments when they promise to investigate.
Read 12 tweets

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