This Week in Misinformation: Intercept'd, Zip Tie Guy 2.0, Chief Twittin', TTV Jailed
3 November 2022
This Prism newsletter strives to be the paper of record for all that’s happening in misinformation in the United States. For any citizen whose life is impacted by misinformation, it helps you see how storylines evolve from multiple, sourced angles on important stories in one place. For amateur and professional misinformation watchers, it is your go-to resource for updates on peers, platforms, propagandists, and politicians. Learn more about Prism and our other products on our Substack page, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook!
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Reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary are in parentheses for each, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.
Now, on to our top stories.
An(other) explosive story is published about the government urging tech platforms to watch for foreign disinformation, but there’s less than meets the eye.
Appearing in The Intercept (40.64), the article by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang is titled “Truth Cops: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation.” The report cites leaked, court-discovered, and public emails and text messages and memos and the like to argue that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been in continuous contact with Facebook and Twitter over the summer about disinformation narratives that are circulating, for example about COVID.
The leader of a disinformation research institute whose involvement was cast as shadowy or secret, however, tweeted that she was proud of having served on the DHS advisory committee and linked to where the recommendations in question were briefed publicly in June (via cisa.gov). Tech reporter Mike Masnick wrote a point-by-point rebuttal to its false claims about what the government and platforms were up to.
But the story hit all the right notes to become very popular with certain audiences, for example anyone who is inclined to label any government effort against disinformation as a “ministry of truth.” Among its boosters on Twitter were conservative media personality Ben Shapiro, the ACLU on the left, and podcaster Tim Pool. Author Lee Fang made an appearance on Tucker well after it was clear that the overall thrust was misleading and that it was outright incorrect in many places (@atrupar via Twitter).
A lot of misinformation cropped up when a man attacked the husband of Nancy Pelosi with a hammer.
David DePape broke into the Pelosi home in San Francisco (Wall Street Journal, 44.86) in the dead of night, looking for Nancy. She wasn’t home, so the man woke her husband Paul and, armed with zip ties (Associated Press, 48.79), resolved to stay in the house until she came back. When the police Paul was able to call arrived, an altercation ensued (NBC Bay Area, -) and DePape landed enough hammer blows on Mr. Pelosi that he needed emergency surgery and a dayslong hospital stay.
The thing about David DePape is that he has a lot of online activity that reporters were able to quickly find, and they almost immediately started telling their audiences (CNN, 42.34) that he had evidently been radicalized by far-right propaganda and planned the attack because of his politics. It’s clear he was also at one point a lefty and held onto at least some of those views as well, but experts will tell you that going from the radical left to the radical right is not all that uncommon (SFGate, -).
Trump and others jumped on isolated factoids out of context or reported incorrectly or secondhand to sow confusion (@meridithmcgraw via Twitter) or weave an entirely different narrative (@DecodingFoxNews via Twitter) from the one that happened. Elon Musk even got in on the action, posting and later deleting a tweet (Bloomberg, 45.13) with a conspiracy theory from a Santa Monica newspaper that is known to be disreputable (Los Angeles Times, 43.70).
Nevermind that the Department of Justice has filed a complaint with details of the attack that make the wacky alternative explanations utterly implausible (@pkcapitol via Twitter), or that major news networks have corroborated that DePape had a list of Democrat targets (CBS News, 46.10). On the right, the obvious explanation must be avoided--because there’s really no defending this without openly embracing political violence.
We do also have to talk a bit more about Elon Musk’s first week as Chief Twit.
Taking on the role of complaint hotline operator, the new owner of Twitter’s first order of business was to pledge help on investigating perceived censorship raised by an account called Catturd. Musk also engaged directly with similar complaints from right-wing figures Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch and candidate for Arizona Secretary of State and Biden “decertification” enthusiast Mark Finchem (KTAR, -). Generally, the platform’s far-right account saw a lot of new followers after Musk took over (New York Times, ), and certainly the Q community (@stuartathompson via Twitter) and others previously deplatformed got their hopes sky high that Elon would restore True Free Speech to the platform.
Within days Musk appears to have intuited, though, that the predictions in this iconic opinion piece in The Verge (44.19) were spot on--namely, setting yourself up as the arbitrator of millions of users’ complaints is a miserable proposition all around. And so it was that Elon announced he would create a new content moderation entity and that no major account reinstatements would go ahead until the council convenes. He also floated additional ideas like putting up a paywall to deter bots (Platformer, -) and the possibility of doing content moderation in tiered fashion (Insider, 42.97).
Furthermore, Musk off-handedly mentioned that he had talked with people from groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, and the Bush Center about how Twitter will ‘continue to combat’ hate and harassment and ‘enforce its election integrity policies.’ This put him firmly on the wrong side of his erstwhile fans on the right (Mike Masnick via Techdirt, -), including Catturd, who immediately denounced him as being for censorship after all.
Phew, that was a lot! Let’s do a quick grab bag and be done: the True The Vote folks are in jail; a judge says that “election-monitoring” group in Arizona has to dial it back; new emails from Team Overturn indicate they were banking on help from Justice Thomas to help Trump stay in power; there isn’t all that much on offer in the new Republican Senate report on the COVID lab leak theory; Jerry Lee Lewis is falsely reported to be dead just before actually dying; remember Halloween candy fentanyl? yeah, neither do we; President Biden speaks out again on election denialism and the threat it poses; and Joe Rogan has this amazing plan to set Kanye West straight with facts.
All that, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin