The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
05 September 19
The Pentagon is using a moral panic over "fake news" to gain influence over
the domestic news landscape
If there's a worse idea than the Pentagon becoming Editor-in-Chief of
America, I can't remember it. But we're getting there:
From Bloomberg over Labor Day weekend:
Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the
Defense Department is launching a project to repel "large-scale, automated
disinformation attacks," as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to
protect the integrity of elections.
One of the Pentagon's most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing "custom software that can unearth
fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio
clips."
Once upon a time, when progressives still reflexively distrusted the
military, DARPA was a liberal punchline, known for helping invent the
Internet but also for developing lunatic privacy-invading projects like
LifeLog, a program to "gather in a single place just about everything an
individual says, sees, or does."
DARPA now is developing a semantic analysis program called "SemaFor" and an
image analysis program called "MediFor," ostensibly designed to prevent the
use of fake images or text. The idea would be to develop these technologies
to help private Internet providers sift through content.
It's the latest in a string of stories about new methods of control over
information flow that should, but for some reason do not, horrify every
working journalist.
From the Senate dragging Internet providers to the Hill to demand strategies
against the sowing of "discord," to tales of hundreds of Facebook sites
zapped for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" following advice by
government-connected groups like the Atlantic Council, it's been clear the
future of the information landscape is going to involve elaborate new forms
of algorithmic regulation.
Stories about the need for such technologies are always couched as responses
to the "fake news" problem. Unfortunately, "fake news" is a poorly-defined,
amorphous concept that the public has been trained to fear without really
understanding.
The term surged into public view three years ago. Experts insisted
Macedonian troll farms and pranksters like the late Paul Horner (who once
conned Fox News into doing a story that Barack Obama was funding a Muslim
culture museum) had an enormous impact on Trump's victory.
Had they? When "fake news" first became "a thing," as media critic Adam
Johnson put it in The Nation three years ago, I was skeptical.
Fake news has a long history in America. Its most pernicious incarnation is
never the work of small-time scam artists. The worst "fake news" almost
always involves broad-scale deceptions foisted on the public by official
(and often unnamed) sources, in conjunction with oligopolistic media
companies, usually in service of rallying the public behind a dubious policy
objective like a war or authoritarian crackdown.
From the sinking of the Maine in 1898, to rumors of a union-led socialist
insurrection before the Palmer raids in 1919, to the Missile Gap in the late
fifties and early sixties (here is the CIA's own website admitting that one
was "erroneous"), to the Gulf of Tonkin lie that launched the Vietnam War,
to the more recent WMD fiasco, true "fake news" is a concerted, organized,
institutional phenomenon that involves deceptions cooked up at the highest
levels.
The other "fake news" - the dubious panic over which began in
November-December of 2016 - is a strange, hybrid concept that mixes fear of
fever-swamp conservative lunacies with satire, Russian propaganda,
legitimate dissent, and other content.
The most infamous example usually cited is Pizzagate, in which Hillary
Clinton and campaign chief John Podesta were falsely said to be running a
pedophile ring out of the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant. The
hoax carried import because a 28 year-old North Carolinian named Edgar
Maddison Welch was idiot enough to shoot up the joint in response.
But the other specific examples cited of "fake" news most often cited are
patently absurd: that the Pope or the Amish endorsed Donald Trump, that
Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS, that an FBI agent investigating
Clinton had died in a house fire (a story broken by the nonexistent "Denver
Guardian"), that the Democrats paid protesters to heckle Trump events, etc.
The idea that these fake tales had a major impact in 2016 is absurd on its
face. They didn't change things any more than ALIEN BACKS CLINTON swayed the
1992 election.
It was laughable beyond belief to see stories in outlets like the New York
Times and the Washington Post taking seriously the notion that small-time
hoaxers like Horner - who was trying to sucker Trump fans to websites so he
could make maybe ten grand a month off click ads - were a major threat to
national security. (That some cited Horner's own claim of responsibility for
Trump's election was even more preposterous).
When officials calling for a crackdown talk about "fake news," you'll often
see them conflating examples of provably false stories with true stories
circulated or interpreted in undesirable ways: the Clinton email scandal,
the Uranium One story, the Podesta email leak, etc.
Even a controversy about Hillary Clinton's health, cited by Ohio State
University researchers as an example of the pernicious impact of fake news,
was an amalgam of true and fake.
There was indeed wild speculation on the Internet and by goons like Sean
Hannity about Clinton suffering from seizures or dementia. This was mixed in
with real events like a 2012 collapse that caused a concussion, the
subsequent discovery of a blood clot in Clinton's brain (ABCnews.com called
it "life threatening" in a headline), and Clinton's September, 2016 collapse
at a 9/11 memorial event.
The New York Times, CNN, CBS, the Washington Post and other reputable
outlets covered the latter episode in great detail. As Vox noted at the
time, this turned an online conspiracy theory into a "mainstream debate."
If there's a fake news story out there, it's the fake news panic itself. It
has the hallmarks of an old-school, WMD-style propaganda campaign.
It includes terrifying pronouncements by unnamed "intelligence officials,"
unprovable, overblown, or outright fake statistical assertions about the
threat (like the oft-cited claim that fake election news had more engagement
than real news), open conflation of legitimate domestic dissent with foreign
attack, and routine dismissal of experts downplaying the problem (here are
two significant studies suggesting the "fake news" phenomenon is
overstated).
Of course, the final, omnipresent ingredient in most major propaganda
campaigns is the authoritarian solution. Here, it's unelected, unsupervised
algorithmic control over media. We've never had a true news regulator in
this country, yet the public is being conditioned now to accept one, without
thinking of the consequences.
The most enormous issue posed by the modern media landscape is the
industry's incredible concentration, which allows a handful of private
platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Google - to dominate media distribution.
This makes it possible to envisage direct levers of control over the
public's media habits that never existed back when people got much of their
news from local paper chains with individual distribution networks. We've
already seen scary examples of misidentified foreign subversion, from the
Washington Post's repeat editorials denouncing Bernie Sanders as a useful
idiot for the Kremlin to the zapping of hundreds of domestic political sites
as "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
What if the same people who can't tell the difference between Truthdig and
Pravda get to help design the new fake news algorithms? That's a much bigger
worry than the next Paul Horner or even, frankly, the next Russian Facebook
campaign. While Donald Trump is in the White House, progressives won't grasp
how scary all of this is, but bet on it: In a few years, we'll all wish we
paid more attention when the Pentagon announced it wanted in on the news
regulation business.
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