This Week in Misinformation: SCOTUS 'Insurrection,' Disinfo Board Under Fire, J6 Committee Probes Social Media, Elon Explains Freemasons' Fall
5 May 2022
This Prism newsletter strives to be the paper of record for all that’s happening in misinformation. 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.
We did a fun thing this week, hosting expert fact-checkers in an audio chat on Twitter to talk about a range of issues in the business of debunking! Check it out.
Now, on to our top stories.
The Supreme Court is going to overturn Roe v. Wade, and somebody leaked the draft opinion several weeks before it would have been released.
By now you’ve read much on what Justice Alito and his 5-4 majority wrote eviscerating the landmark 1973 decision that made it illegal for states to outlaw abortion. Reactions to the substance of this bill are predictably falling along partisan lines. The circumstances of the leak are not entirely unprecedented, but it is almost certainly the most notable such episode in the Court’s history.
Elected Republicans are insisting that the leaker be caught and prosecuted (NBC News, 45.80), but this is a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand. Legal experts have pointed out, for example, that leaking unclassified information is not actually against any laws as far as anyone can tell. But presuming, without basis, that something illegal has happened seems to be taking shape as kind of a given in service of the outrage machine. There are also many theories about who the leaker is, including ones that make no sense like saying it was Justice Thomas’s MAGA enthusiast wife Ginni, but investigations are just beginning into who might have done it (New York Times, 44.31).
Related, at least one major QAnon influencer was anticipating protests in the streets and called preemptively for these to be labeled “insurrections” so as to dilute the meaning of the word (@PokerPolitics via Twitter). Trying a related tack, TrumpWorld characters Ron DeSantis (WFLA) and Jenna Ellis (Insider, 43.22) hoped to paint the leak itself as an “insurrection” worse than what Trump’s mob did on January 6th. And on to even smoother brain stuff, some in QAnon claimed the leak was a Deep State plot not against anyone in particular but to distract from the release of a documentary that really, really this time, proves the 2020 election was fraudulent (VICE, 41.87).
As the DHS Disinformation Governance Board keeps its silence, opponents are warping the conversation about its mandate and remit.
The Board is intended to coordinate work already being done at DHS against foreign influence operations and smugglers lying to would-be migrants (CBS News, 46.08). But the agency has communicated its purpose poorly (Associated Press, 48.82), leaving itself open to conspiracy theories about how Biden had created a censormongering monstrosity reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 (Protocol, -).
The political right, as ever against counter-disinformation efforts, has relentlessly attacked the new entity since it was announced last month (New York Times, 44.31). It was all over Fox News (35.33) (Media Matters, -). Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security Committee cited it repeatedly and flashed posters of executive director Nina Jankowicz’s past tweets when DHS Secretary Mayorkas appeared before them (PBS, 48.36).
DHS has a lot of skepticism to overcome in this area, for example at least one report on Russian disinformation it put out under Trump was probably politicized by the senior official performing the duties of acting secretary, Chad Wolf (CNN, 42.78).
The House January 6th Committee is in its final month before televised hearings, and hints abound about the case it is preparing to make.
The Committee, apparently acknowledging the key role social media played in twisting reality for so many people leading up to the Capitol attack, has interviewed at least a dozen Facebook employees (Politico, 42.78). The Government Accountability Office reported that Facebook in fact already warned the FBI that bad things were happening on its platform before the attack took place (Just Security, -). Parler is also of interest to the investigation; the Committee reportedly has a subpoena for that platform’s founder (Rolling Stone, 38.77)
Three more members of Congress received Committee letters requesting information about their January 6th activities: Ronny Jackson, Andy Biggs, and Mo Brooks (NPR, 44.50), but all immediately refused citing the supposed illegitimacy of the panel. This is easier said (BuzzFeed News, 43.22) than believed: in a ruling against a Republican National Committee petition to block the Committee from getting email records, a federal judge again positively affirmed that it has legislative purpose (Axios, 44.38).
In other J6 news: Mark Meadows sees a witch hunt, and he's the witch (Axios, 44.38), Donald Trump Jr. sat down with the Committee (ABC News, 46.80), and the second and third Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy have pleaded guilty (NBC News, 45.80).
Never been so happy to see you, grab bag: the Birds Aren't Real guy was awesome on 60 Minutes; crypto is way down and its inauthentic boosters are being exposed; the official House Republicans Twitter account fell for a parody article on Hunter Biden; New York Times (44.31) watched 1,150 episodes of Tucker for science; VICE dove deep on Russia’s Cyber Front Z disinformation thing; Lin Wood beefs with an election audit group he once supported because it didn’t find fraud; a deeply pilled Q bro pulled out a win over other Republicans for the party’s nomination to represent Ohio’s 9th Congressional District; Arizona seems to keep swinging further right, further fringe; huge study on people making “ballot trafficking” the current thing; the Senate Judiciary Committee brought in experts to talk platform transparency; Facebook is rethinking the news feed; Bill Gates warns Elon Musk could make Twitter misinformation worse; Musk did a jokey tweet about Freemasons; and lots of people banned from Twitter including Trump, an alt-right Holocaust denier named Chuck C. Johnson, Roger Stone, and Mike Lindell are hoping Uncle Elon gives them their megaphones back soon.
That, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin