Narrative Laundering

How do journalists and tech platforms determine what information is verifiable online? How can news ...

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How do journalists and tech platforms determine what information is verifiable online? How can news consumers determine which media outlets to trust when the line between partisan bias and disinformation becomes hazier and hazier? On today’s episode, David and Sarah are joined by Renée DiResta—a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and a writer at Wired and the Atlantic—for a conversation about disinformation online. “Anybody with a laptop can make themselves look like a media organization, can use a variety of social media marketing techniques to grow an audience, and then can push out whatever they want to say to that audience,” DiResta warns. Where do we go from here? Tune in to learn about journalistic ethics surrounding the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story and what to expect from disinformation actors this election cycle.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Elizabeth Vander Galien

    Someone needs to tell Jonah that Hunter signed a receipt when he dropped off the laptops.

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    WKDawson

    Very informative. "Tennessee GOP" ... I guess there are predators everywhere and it seems that they know absolutely no shame. "The way justifies the means", Marx said, but anyone can use that playbook.

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    Barry Cope

    I was just wondering if you all would be doing a special Dispatch Live! event for election night? I'd love to listen to all of your thoughts as the returns come in. It doesn't have to be all night, or have everyone on all the time, but a couple of hours of you all would be a welcome relief from typical broadcast or cable media. Though it might interfere with serious drinking.

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    Angie

    Good Pod...loved the ending...for me, it is Wizards and Elves and Unicorns, you know, fantasy stuff....I also really wish Merlin, in particular, was real...Ikinda believed it all as a kid, more like a hope it was true

    I am with you on Nessie too...or if we found any water-based dinosaur that survived...

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  5. Sam

    Is there a way to listen to the dispatch podcast on the phone by calling in?

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    Tracie

    Once made the mistake of sharing an RT article, which was well-written and seemed reasonable, but was definitely part of a narrative to gin up outrage. Happened to agree with the basic content of the article, but it's intent was still disinformation.

    Many of my older, Christian fundamentalist relatives have shared memes on Facebook that are at best dubious in origin. These are not people who would listen if I told them that.

    People on Twitter make fun of Facebook, but for those of us who are not typical selfie Instagram / Tik-Tok age, and are not media figures, that's where a lot of friends, family, co-workers live their social media lives. Twitter is a place I go to get news and links, not a place I chat with people I know.

    Recently had some acute health problems, and a big Facebook instant message is how I kept my co-workers in the loop. It's also a place to at least keep track of rarely seen family members, high school friends, especially for someone who lives far away from where I grew up.

    As for Facebook groups, I belong to some that share art where no overt politics is allowed. They're pretty strictly moderated. I suppose these groups that have unwittingly included disinformation trolls learning their audiences are a little more identity-based. That, if nothing else, should tell us the dangers of identity politics. Lower the bar for inclusion to slogans and labels, and anybody can play the part.

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    BrettH

    Very informative, thanks y’all. Don’t worry Sarah, one type of dinosaur did make it: birds. Know where I learned that? Advisory Opinions

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  8. Joe1776

    I think one of her points was that internal disinformation is more of the issue. I have to agree wholeheartedly. The dispatch often makes the point that both sides often act in partisan ways distorting the truth in one area for what they believe is the greater good but this should be resisted.

    Here are a couple of articles with examples of the problems of internal disinformation:

    https://thedispatch.com/p/the-left-is-twisting-the-meaning

    https://thedispatch.com/p/our-elected-officials-are-a-threat

    I think both of those are leveled at the left but it happens both ways.

    But consider this point in the second article:
    "All of this misinformation is laid at the feet of a credulous public that already has a tenuous grasp of American civics. According to a long-running Annenberg poll, only 39 percent of Americans in 2019 could name all three branches of government. Only 55 percent knew Democrats controlled the U.S. House of Representatives and 61 percent knew Republicans controlled the Senate. Barely more than half (55 percent) of Americans knew that a narrow 5-4 Supreme Court ruling must be followed anyway."

    Can we blame the Russians for this level of ignorance?

    I think what the Russians are doing seems very sinister but I think they are also a diversion/scapegoat from the bigger problem we face about a misinformed and uninformed public.

    Also lets assume the emails are legitimate and accurate. I know big "if". Should there impact on our views vary depending on whether they got there legally or not? (to the extent you think there is something impactful there)

    If we found out the NYT got their tax return records from a Russian hack but they were nevertheless accurate should we give them less weight? If it was a an American hack or some other American theft does that matter? (again to the extent you think there is something impactful there)

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      Tracie

      Putin is playing a longer game than that. It's not just one story or piece of information. The state-sponsored trolls will emphasize and flood the zone with information and views that they believe will inflame passions, sow confusion, and ultimately decrease confidence in the American system.

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      Adicesa14

      In the 60’s, politicians of each party, but mostly Republicans, warned of Russian infiltration into the ongoing demonstrations. Being the decade after the McCarthy and ‘red scare’ era, it was ignored, or ridiculed. However, if this or something similar occurred, some former demonstrators (infiltrators?) or their influence possibly entered our non-governmental institutions (i.e. education, unions, journalism, etc.), and slowly altered the conduct of business (i.e. curricula, news confirmation processes, etc.). Perhaps this or something similar is the origin of our current disarray. After all, it is occasionally said by pundits and editorialists that Nations, excluding the USA, play the ‘long game.’

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    James Spiller

    This was an excellent podcast. Thank you. One minor caveat is that it seemed to focus, as if often the case with academics and to borrow from Jonah, on a particular part of the elephant, suggesting that the issue is all trunk. Having domestic providers of disinformation is not new, although this wave is somewhat different (each new era brings new forms of Russian horror).

    When Putin was pushing conspiracy theories about AIDS and other things into African American communities, there were a lot of what we would now call Hoteps pushing the same sort of stuff; if you’re interested in it, check out the NOI’s newspaper, which is still kind of amazing today. It’s great for the Russians when they can form their own pawn communities in America, but it’s even better for them when they find Americans who already want to spread the message the Kremlin wants, whether that’s Murray Rothbard wrenching the Libertarian Party from the Koch’s anti-communist platform to a moral equivalence, objectively pro-Soviet position, Civil Rights groups focused on educating Americans about the horrors of anti-black racism (or homophobia, papophobia, or whatever the group that particular Kremlin task force was victimizing by alienating them from America or by encouraging Americans to alienate them).

    So, while direct Russian action of the sort DiResta focuses on is important, suborned American institutions are also pretty vital. Via Paul Manafort, for instance, Putin was able to get one of the most widely read, most trusted and most famously principled sources on the right (although I think Breitbart might have been just number two in readership at that point), Ben Shapiro, to publish obvious falsehoods about Ukraine, smearing opposition to Putin as anti-Semitic ( https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2012/10/29/clinton-ukraine-tymoshenko-anti-semitism/ ), which was a charge that had been made elsewhere, and claiming that Tymoshenko and Yanukovych were equivalent from Putin’s perspective, which is not a claim made by any other person not in the direct pay of the Kremlin, for obvious reasons if you know anything about Tymoshenko’s lifelong struggle against Russia and Yanukovych’s long history of subservience, which culminated in his current Russian residency ( https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2012/10/22/obama-ukraine-yanukovych/ ). Breitbart was, under Shapiro’s editorship, an organ that liked Cruz as much as Trump, but as Shapiro began to split with them turned more towards Trump. It became highly enthusiastic in its support of the now President, affirming him under almost all circumstances, but it nonetheless consistently turned on Trump when Trump got crosswise with Putin.

    We have influence peddling admitted to in Manafort’s criminal confession, but for most Breitbart articles we don’t have a suggestion of direct Russian involvement. It’s an American institution that has found support for the Kremlin to be incredibly profitable. Analogously, when libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie said that he had thought that people who voted for libertarians like himself and Rand Paul were principled libertarians, but adjusted this on seeing the demographic predominantly voting for Trump to them seeking the 'craziest son of a bitch in the race'; politically “crazy” people, in the sense of the people most likely to distrust mainstream media sources (not saying that this is the definition, saying that this is a very strong correlation) have always been the most vulnerable to Russian provision of alternative media sources designed to appeal to their factional preoccupations. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rep-massies-theory-voters-who-voted-for-libertarians-and-then-trump-were-always-just-seeking-the-craziest-son-of-a-bitch-in-the-race They’re Americans, and they’re not working for the Kremlin, but their interest was in finding media that would help explain the world to them as they saw it, primarily in terms of entrenched elites betraying or openly oppressing conservatives (depending on political party), so they found and supported media that back the conspiracy theories they want. One America News, likewise, doesn’t appear to me to be a Russian front, but often finds it useful to publish open Russian (or sometimes Chinese) propaganda, because sometimes propaganda is well made, meaning that it is effectively designed to be appealing to OAN. And when you regularly publish repackaged RT material, you have a pretty strong incentive for the rest of your content to form a coherent picture with it.

    But it’s not just the fringes. There are Russian owned semi-respectable newspapers that find themselves to be the most widely linked sources on Middle Eastern News (the UK based Independent being the most prominent), and Reuters is now in formal partnership with state run outlet TASS, leading it to publish stories about how great life is under Assad during the Civil War (apparently salsa dancing is flourishing).

    And there’s the politicians and activists, the think tanks and the journalists, such that even organs that aren’t suborned themselves will often carry content by someone who is. And there’s the good faith journalists who find themselves in an ideological pool that provides them with awful content; I remember listening to a BBC broadcast early in the Syrian Civil War that both contained the news that the FSA was already adequately armed and did not need Western support, and also that they had been attempting to import fireworks as improvised weapons. We occasionally find a case of blackmail and crude compulsion (we find a lot more as time passes and archives become available), but for the most part the content is provided by people who really believe that we should think less of America today because it is too left wing, too right wing, too dominated by left and right, too dominated by white people, too governed by lizard people, or whatever the issue is, and are happy to be guided by more hits, more pay, more praise etc., to have their story denouncing Republicans, Democrats, the Two Party System, African Americans, or whatever it is falling in line with preferred Kremlin stories.

    And there’s the hacks. Along with the creation of facts on the ground (creating and weaponizing the Syrian refugee wave remains Putin’s most successful strategy for empowering radicals on left and right that reduce European opposition to him), this in some ways relatively traditional form of espionage is critical to empowering news organizations that will run with Kremlin news stories, while empowering the sort of critiques that can be defended by Rev Snow’s responses. Edward Snowden didn’t publish false things when he told the Taliban which Afghans they should murder for the crimes of pursuing education for young girls. Glenn Greenwald isn’t unusually dishonest. But they nonetheless work effectively to promote Russian state interests, uncovering the secrets of those the FSB opposes while leaving opaque the curtains of those the FSB protects.

    And each one of those elements serves as a force multiplier to all the others. If you’re not seeing the multi-billion dollar elephant as a whole, you’re not going to understand why racial healing is so hard, why our politics are so polarized, why support for Ukraine is so meager, why third parties are so successful in their messaging, why conspiracy theories are flourishing and so on.

    I mean, you should read David’s book, too. There are domestic dynamics at work as well. But you really need both, just as was true in the 1960s and 1970s, the last time our politics took on this hue.

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      Victor Clairmont

      For a small caveat that's a long statement.

      I kid I kid James.

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        James Spiller

        It’s a small caveat that the picture excellently painted by the podcast is really just one part of a larger whole, and I didn’t feel like there was quite as much context as would have been ideal. Sadly, there’s a lot of people out there whose prior really was that Putin’s propaganda budget of billions per year for decades purchased nothing more than a few hundred thousand dollars of dumb memes once, so saying it lacked context wasn’t enough. I needed to also outline the context.

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          Victor Clairmont

          Honestly, there's a lot coming up on foreign policy to deal with Armenia and Azerbaijan and the ongoing conflict there. It goes back to the dissolution of the old Soviet Empire and even to the Turkish evil Armenian Genocide (Erdogan is supporting Azerbaijan with arms and planes). Pretty sure when an article on The Dispatch pops up on it, we will have a lot to say.

          But going back to your point and even domestic policy (and the podcast), the old Soviet Union knew about the class struggles with racism of the 50's and 60's. In fact, if you look at many black intellectual writers or even artists (The great poet Langston Hughes for example), they were sympathetic to Marxism and communism. Communist and socialist groups reached out to many black intelligensia, and many blacks saw it as a good effort attempt. Even the Rev. Martin Luther, was amendable to socialism, because they thought what was being done in America was terrible under capitalism.

          Problem is, Communism and Marxism kills everyone, regardless of skin color.

          But that's a story for another time. Point in case, many nations will always know the currently politics of the top dog (America), than many of the top nation knows of its competitors.

          After all, everyone speaks english as it's the international business language. Not many speak mandarin or russian. Ditto for when the west was Roman and everyone spoke Greek as the international language. Lots of small nations knew Greek idea's and politics, and Roman too (when Latin was the international language). But I doubt many Roman's knew about the politics of say, the barbarian Celts or the middle eastern countries that would bring down Constantinople far into the future.

          Whoever is the top of the world, their competitors will have a long time to study their weakness. It's been 70 years since WW2, and both China, and Russia, have had plenty of time to study us.

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            James Spiller

            Oh, and it’s worth noting that Communist regimes are not always racially neutral in who they oppose, but I agree that discussion of racism and oppression in the Second World is likely to arise in the future and seems like an unnecessary rabbit hole here.

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            James Spiller

            Right. I said in my final sentence that Russian espionage efforts were vital to understanding the polarization, violence, and racial antipathy of the 1960s and 1970s. Putin’s famous AIDS hoaxes were an innovation slightly after that, but there was a *lot* of effort successfully put into encouraging Americans to hate each other and their country. As DiResta notes (and Tony below), they play a long game; you’ll often find institutions that form cornerstones of Russian influence today performing the same function decades ago.

            I also agree that Armenian issues represent an important example of the value to Putin of influence in America. Pompeo has been shamefully supportive of the Russian position there and that matters. Russia finds profit in most of the world’s horror shows, in a self reinforcing manner (Russian efforts with Maduro, for instance, helped provide for cheap provision of legitimacy for Assad, and vice versa: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200319-venezuela-to-open-cultural-centre-in-syrias-damascus/ ). Armenia is just another instance of Russia being able to provide decisive diplomatic as well as mercenary services to a country that would otherwise be independent of Moscow.

            Where we disagree is about the degree to which American politics are known to the Russians because American politics are the Lingua Franca. I don’t know you, Victor, but playing the odds I’d be willing to bet that you’re not familiar with the surprisingly libertarian economic platform of the Nation of Islam, because few non-believers are. Likewise, when you talk to people about the structure of the Libertarian Party, or about why Gary Johnson felt the need to say in his book that for libertarians evaluating the Civil War tariffs are a bigger issue than slavery (particularly notable given that Johnson doesn’t think that tariffs are important, as seen in his TPP rejection). Outside of the LP, even for many LP voters, neoconfederacy seems like an unrelated issue.

            The Russians are good at this stuff because they’ve had trained professionals working with subcultures that are not the Lingua Franca for decades. This both increases the cultural literacy of the the Russians, who often have considerably greater understanding of the subcultures than the American, but parochially elite, MSM. If you want to understand El Paso anti-vaxx issues, having worked to promote distrust of vaccinations for forty years (or having an assistant who has) is more helpful than having visited Six Flags in your youth. David touched on this with the @TEN_GOP scandal. It’s not that foreigners haven’t heard of Tennessee or know about Jack Daniels; it’s understanding Tennessee well enough that a lot of Tennessean Republicans, people who worked for the party, were taken in by the authenticity of the voice.

            The Russian ability and desire to mess with Manhattanites is meaningfully about the media there being the Lingua Franca. Their interest in inciting racial hostility in Cleveland stems from the utility of such in mitigating US support for American allies abroad and opposition to horror abroad, a utility that works through multiple vectors.

            As DiResta noted, China is simply different. This is both because you cannot quickly create decades old networks of people who serve your interests, some of them without understanding that they do so, and nor can you quickly develop the deep and rich cultural literacy required to create those networks, and because China doesn’t care all that much. China engages with countries it would like to become pawns by lending them money and engaging in traditional commercial diplomacy; assuming you’re not North Korean or Chinese, you’re pretty unlikely to be murdered as a result of your disagreement with a Chinese ally. Likewise, China doesn’t put a lot of effort into making the media hate people who are fighting China’s allies. For the most part, Chinese manipulation efforts are crude transactions intended to directly encourage people to avoid criticisms of China. People who say that China is more important from this perspective are correct to note that China is unimaginably wealthier and more successful than Russia, but it is like noting that an aircraft carrier is massively more expensive and powerful than a fishing trawler; it doesn’t mean that the carrier is better at fishing. There *is* crossover in the hacking arena, but for the most part China doesn’t have the ability to project force outside of its immediate environment, either politically or militarily.

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    Emily

    That was excellent information. I knew that foreign adversaries had gotten very good at “reading” Americans but I hadn’t realized how sophisticated they are and how significant those little nudges toward grievances may be in shaping how we act and react. It would likely be easy (or easier) to recognize a bludgeon tactic, but subtlety is going to be harder to get a handle on. And then there is the problem of momentum - having amplified a grievance society, we seem to be taking the torch to ourselves.

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      Seth B

      Yes indeed. Your comment that "subtlety is going to be harder and harder to get a handle on" puts it mildly.

      For an eye-opening taste of the (very near) future of when disinformation is combined with artificial intelligence and deep fakes, try Sam Harris's most recent podcast, "The Information Apocalypse", with Nina Schick. Holy moly! Utterly fascinating, but disturbing.

      (Incidentally, I first heard Renee DiResta on Sam's podcast a year or so ago.)

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