from the disinfo-about-disinfo dept
We already covered the oral arguments in the Murthy v. Missouri case earlier this week, showing that the Supreme Court appears to be quite skeptical of the arguments by the states regarding the federal government “jawboning” to convince social media to take down certain content. For months now, we’ve been pointing out that the factual record in that case is a mess, driven by conspiracy theorists pushing nonsense. Unfortunately, a few Judges both believed the nonsense and then when they couldn’t rely on it to make their point had to misquote people, quote things out of context, or entirely fabricate parts of quotes in their rulings.
What became abundantly clear in the oral arguments Monday was that multiple justices, including Trump-appointed ones, found the factual record to be suspect and problematic. The crux of the case was effectively (1) the White House made a few public statements in which they were angry about how social media moderated, (2) the companies regularly met with government agencies about a variety of things (cybersecurity, COVID misinformation, election integrity), and (3) therefore we can assume that any content moderation that occurred on the platforms was at the government’s command.
It was a weak argument, and multiple justices pointed out how tenuous the connection was between the government and the actions of the companies.
Over the last few months, we’ve pointed out a few times how this and some related campaigns have been weaponized by proxies to try to stifle any effort to respond to (not block!) disinformation campaigns and election interference, including the misleading publication of “The Twitter Files,” by pretend journalists who didn’t understand what they were looking at (nor bother to speak to any experts who might have explained it to them).
The media is slowly, but surely, putting the underlying story together of how a bunch of nonsense peddlers concocted a full blown conspiracy theory full of disinformation, all targeted at destroying the ability of disinformation researchers to counter disinformation by attacking them as censors. Last September, the Washington Post had a big story on this:
In November, NBC had a big story that went a bit further in highlighting how this effort had basically killed off perfectly reasonable information sharing (of the nature that Justices Kagan and Kavanaugh noted happen all the time in government).
And, just before the Murthy hearing, the NY Times put out a big piece tying together some of the loose ends about all this, and detailing the nature of the campaign. The whole effort was, in short, a made up conspiracy theory by a group of operatives seeking to kneecap any research into disinformation or how to counter it, perhaps recognizing how such efforts would harm Donald Trump. As the article notes, much of it seems to have been orchestrated by Trump advisor Stephen Miller:
Benz is a bizarre character. As an anonymous troll online, he pushed blatantly bigoted nonsense about the “great replacement theory” and “white genocide.” Now he presents himself as a former State Department official and a cybersecurity expert. His name shows up repeatedly in all of this, including in efforts by Jim Jordan to attack disinformation research. The reality was that he was a low-level speechwriter in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who then helped Stephen Miller as a speechwriter, and only joined the State Department in November of 2020 after Trump lost the election.
It was only then that he suddenly remade himself as a “cyber expert,” despite having no real qualifications or experience in the space. And he continued to leverage that brief couple of months in the State Department to suggest he has some sort of deep knowledge or expertise of government censorship. The NY Times notes how Benz’s conspiracy theory nonsense (in which he’s either never actually understood, or deliberately misunderstands, the nature of disinformation research) became the fuel that powered both the Missouri case and Jim Jordan’s weaponization committee:
Benz was also one of the originators of the bogus “22 million tweets” claims that completely tripped up Matt Taibbi (the number was how many tweets the Election Integrity Partnership reviewed as discussing the mis- and disinfo topics they covered after the election, and had nothing to do with how many tweets the EIP reported to Twitter: just a few thousand). As the NY Times details, Taibbi’s partner in the Twitter Files, Mike Shellenberger, credits Benz with helping him understand what he had “uncovered” with the Twitter Files:
As we’ve detailed, Taibbi and Shellenberger never seemed to understand what they were looking at and flailed around embarrassingly for months. They needed help from someone who actually understood stuff to pull together the pieces (which would have shown the mostly boring, ho-hum nature of what Twitter’s trust & safety team was actually doing). Instead, they got suckered in by a nonsense-peddling conspiracy theorist who told a story that played right into the confirmation bias they needed to convince themselves that they had been gifted a huge story of government censorship (which is just not supported by any of the evidence).
The Times report also suggests that Jim Jordan’s “Weaponization” subcommittee appears to have leaked private deposition information to Stephen Miller to help him file even more sketchy lawsuits.
However, all of this adds up to a pretty straightforward path: a bunch of Trumpist operatives in the form of Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, Mike Benz and some others have plotted out a nonsense conspiracy theory — either deliberately or by simply misunderstanding what they were looking at — to present an entirely fictional story of a “censorship industrial complex,” and the only real purpose of this effort is to kneecap researchers and experts in disinformation from studying how disinformation flows and how to best counter it.
Having watched all of this play out over the past two years, and feeling like I was yelling into the wind about it (especially as someone who has actually spent years calling out actual attempts by the government to censor content), it was at least comforting to see multiple Justices (mainly Kavanaugh, Barrett, Sotomayor and Kagan) see through all of this and recognize the emptiness at the heart of the Murthy lawsuit, which almost entirely consists of sand being deliberately thrown around by a bunch of bullshit peddlers.