10 Eric Levitz, “David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics,” Intelligencer, July 17, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html.
11 Yascha Mounk, “Stop Firing the Innocent,” The Atlantic, June 27, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615.
12 Jonathan Chait, “The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age,” Intelligencer, June 11, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-tom-cotton-new-york-times-james-bennet.html.
13 Jonathan Chait, “An Elite Progressive LISTSERV Melts Down over a Bogus Racism Charge,” Intelligencer, June 23, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-tom-cotton-new-york-times-james-bennet.html.
14 Matthew Yglesias, “The Real Stakes in the David Shor Saga,” Vox, July 29, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow-speech.
15 Renée DiResta, “Mediating Consent,” The Feed, Ribbonfarm, December 17, 2019, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/12/17/mediating-consent.
16 For a full examination of the means by which the internet transformed advocacy and organizing, see David Karpf, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy, Oxford Studies in Digital Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
17 Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), introduction.
18 Stephan Lewandowsky, Ronald E. Robertson, and Renée DiResta, “Challenges in Understanding Human-Algorithm Entanglement During Online Information Consumption,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, July 10, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231180809.
19 Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt (New York: Currency, 2020), 194–197.
20 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960; reis., New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 29.
21 Renée DiResta, “Crowds and Technology,” Ribbonfarm, September 15, 2016, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/09/15/crowds-and-technology.
22 Renée DiResta, “Elon Musk Is Fighting for Attention, Not Free Speech,” The Atlantic, April 14, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/elon-musk-buy-twitter-free-speech/629571.
23 I’ve chosen to use Wikipedia for some citations on controversial topics, including this one, because of the “negotiated facts” and consensus process that results in the creation of Wikipedia’s articles. See “Gamergate (Harassment Campaign),” Wikipedia, last modified August 12, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign).
24 USA Today quotes Steve Bannon, who took over Breitbart News in 2012, describing the rise of the alt-right movement that Breitbart helped to galvanize: “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.” Mike Snider, “Steve Bannon Learned to Harness Troll Army from ‘World of Warcraft,’” USA Today, July 18, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001.
25 Emily St. James, “#Gamergate: Here’s Why Everybody in the Video Game World Is Fighting,” Vox, October 13, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-everybody-fighting.
26 Caitlin Dewey, “The Only Guide to Gamergate You Will Ever Need to Read,” Washington Post, October 14, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/the-only-guide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read.
27 Study methodologies vary but range from 7 to 15 percent for staunchly antivaccine and up to 30 percent for vaccine hesitant. See Timothy B. Gravelle et al., “Estimating the Size of ‘Anti-vax’ and Vaccine Hesitant Populations in the US, UK, and Canada: Comparative Latent Class Modeling of Vaccine Attitudes,” Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics 18, no. 1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2021.2008214; Hannah A. Roberts et al., “To Vax or Not to Vax: Predictors of Anti-vax Attitudes and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Prior to Widespread Vaccine Availability,” PLoS One 17, no. 2 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264019.
28 Sarah Elbeshbishi and Mabinty Quarshie, “Fewer Than 1 in 5 Support ‘Defund the Police’ Movement, USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll Finds,” USA Today, March 7, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/07/usa-today-ipsos-poll-just-18-support-defund-police-movement/4599232001.
29 Political keywords in bios also became more prevalent. A study of keywords in Twitter user bios found that indicators of political identity almost tripled between 2015 and 2018. N. Rogers and J. J. Jones, “Using Twitter Bios to Measure Changes in Self-Identity: Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically over Time?,” Journal of Social Computing 2, no. 1 (March 2021): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2021.0002.
30 B. J. Bethel, “GamerGate Meme War Shares DNA with Pro–Donald Trump Trolls,” Sydney Morning Herald, September 14, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/gamergate-meme-war-shares-dna-with-prodonald-trump-trolls-20160914-grg052.html.
31 Sam Levin, “Millionaire Tells Millennials: If You Want a House, Stop Buying Avocado Toast,” Guardian, May 15, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/australian-millionaire-millennials-avocado-toast-house.
32 Renée DiResta, “It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda,” The Atlantic, October 9, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334.
33 Shahid Buttar (@ShahidForChange), “Why do you think #PelosiMustGo?,” Twitter, July 12, 2020, 11:59 a.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20200712201533/https://twitter.com/ShahidForChange/status/1282389059768213504.
34 Emily Zanotti, “‘Pelosi Must Go’: Speaker Blasted from the Left over ‘Corporate Interests,’” Daily Wire, July 14, 2020, https://www.dailywire.com/news/pelosi-must-go-speaker-blasted-from-the-left-over-corporate-interests.
35 Chris Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 31–32.
36 Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer, The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities for Personal and Collective Success (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2021), 29.
37 Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice, 5th ed. (1984; reis., Boston: Pearson, 2009), 99.
38 Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002): 175–195.
39 Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions (New York: Hachette, 2022), 39–42.
40 Van Bavel and Packer, The Power of Us, 77.
41 Ibid., 170–171.
42 Steve Rathje, Jay J. Van Bavel, and Sander van der Linden, “Out-Group Animosity Drives Engagement on Social Media,” PNAS 118, no. 26 (2021), https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024292118.
43 Freddie deBoer, “The YIMBYs and Social Capture,” FdB, Substack, February 27, 2023, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-yimby-movement-demonstrates-social.
44 Sandra González‐Bailón and Yphtach Lelkes, “Do Social Media Undermine Social Cohesion? A Critical Review,” Social Issues and Policy Review 17, no. 1 (January 2023): 155–180, https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12091.
45 Thanks to Gary Zhexi Zhang for the metaphor.
46 Helen C. Harton, Matthew Gunderson, and Martin J. Bourgeois, “‘I’ll Be There with You’: Social Influence and Cultural Emergence at the Capitol on January 6,” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 26, no. 3 (2022): 220–238, https://doi.org/10.1037/gdn0000185.
47 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), preface.
48 Ibid., 91.
49 Clay Shirky, “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy,” in The Best Software Writing I, ed. Joel Spolsky (Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2005), 183–209, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-0038-3_23.
50 J. M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan, “The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and Describing the Population of ISIS Supporters on Twitter,” Brookings, March 5, 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-isis-twitter-census-defining-and-describing-the-population-of-isis-supporters-on-twitter.
51 “We consider a particular role to be influential in the spread of information, when a link posted by that role induces an account in another role to post the same link with high probability. We find that for information originating from extremist sources, educators and solicitors are the most influential in triggering other roles to also spread such content. Whereas, motivators influence other roles spreading biased news, flamers are influential in the spread of fake news.” See Shruti Phadke and Tanushree Mitra, “Educators, Solicitors, Flamers, Motivators, Sympathizers: Characterizing Roles in Online Extremist Movements,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, no. CSCW2 (2021): 1–35.
52 Hoffer, The True Believer, 130–140.
53 Ibid., 114.
54 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 29.
55 Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, xxiii.
56 Aidan Walker, “What’s the Deal with ‘Stonks’?,” Know Your Meme, 2022, https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/whats-the-deal-with-stonks.
57 “Elon Musk Charged with Securities Fraud for Misleading Tweets,” US Securities and Exchange Commission, September 27, 2018, https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-219.
58 Allison Morrow, “Elon Musk Tweet Fuels Frenzied GameStop Surge,” CNN Business, January 28, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/26/investing/gamestop-stock-elon-musk-reddit/index.html.
59 Steve Goldstein, “GameStop Stock Hits as High as $500 in Premarket Action,” MarketWatch, January 28, 2021, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gamestop-stock-hits-as-high-as-500-in-premarket-action-2021-01-28.
60 Emily Stewart and Rani Molla, “Robinhood, and Its Role in the GameStop Saga, Explained,” Vox, January 30, 2021, https://www.vox.com/recode/22254270/robinhood-gamestop-amc-block-wallstreetbets-day-trading.
61 Matt Levine, “The GameStop Game Never Stops,” Bloomberg, January 25, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/the-game-never-stops.
62 Robert J. Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 273–274.
63 DiResta, “It’s Not Misinformation.”
CHAPTER 5: BUILDING THE BIG LIE
1 Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, “#StopTheSteal: Timeline of Social Media and Extremist Activities Leading to 1/6 Insurrection,” Just Security, May 18, 2021, https://www.justsecurity.org/74622/stopthesteal-timeline-of-social-media-and-extremist-activities-leading-to-1-6-insurrection.
2 Will Sommer, “How the Ilhan Omar Marriage Smear Went from an Anonymous Post on an Obscure Forum to Being Embraced by Trump,” Daily Beast, July 19, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-ilhan-omar-marriage-smear-went-from-an-anonymous-post-on-an-obscure-forum-to-being-embraced-by-trump.
3 Paul Farhi, “John McCain Knew How to Make Journalists Love Him,” Washington Post, August 27, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/john-mccain-knew-how-to-make-journalists-love-him/2018/08/27/9b156f80-a9bc-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html.
4 Journalism and Media Staff, “McCain vs. Obama on the Web,” Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, August 18, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2008/09/15/mccain-vs-obama-on-the-web.
5 Roger Sollenberger, “Right-Wing Trolls Launch Stop the Steal PAC to Cash In on Election Lies,” Salon, November 18, 2020, https://www.salon.com/2020/11/18/right-wing-trolls-launch-stop-the-steal-pac-to-cash-in-on-election-lies.
6 Rob Kuznia et al., “Stop the Steal’s Massive Disinformation Campaign Connected to Roger Stone,” CNN, November 14, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs/index.html. Roger Stone is credited with first using the phrase “Stop the Steal” in 2016 in association with the Trump campaign as it anticipated a loss.
7 Zach Sweat, “Field Guide to Political Emojis,” Know Your Meme, April 12, 2023, https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/field-guide-to-political-emojis.
8 Nick Corasaniti, Sheera Frenkel, and Nicole Perlroth, “App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested,” New York Times, February 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/us/politics/iowa-caucus-app.html; “Nevada Hopes to Avoid Chaos of Iowa Caucuses as Bloomberg Tries to Recover,” NBC News, February 21, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/how-iowa-caucuses-fell-apart-tarnished-vote-n1140346.
9 “Bernie Sanders’ Supporters Shouldn’t Fall for Republicans’ Impeachment Conspiracy,” NBC News, January 16, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/bernie-sanders-supporters-shouldn-t-fall-republicans-impeachment-conspiracy-ncna1116576.
10 Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN), “This can’t be!,” Twitter, February 4, 2020, https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1224575334248566784.
11 Renée DiResta, “The Conspiracies Are Coming from Inside the House,” The Atlantic, March 10, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/internet-conspiracies-are-coming-inside-country/607645.
12 “Online Conspiracy Theories Flourish After Iowa Caucus Fiasco,” AP News, May 1, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/iowa-elections-lindsey-graham-ia-state-wire-donald-trump-8ae0e5172130f81265172fbd3e65094a,%20; Ben Nimmo (@ebenimmo), “Looking into Twitter traffic…,” Twitter, February 5, 2020, https://twitter.com/benimmo/status/1224832953458614272.
13 Data compiled from the Stanford Internet Observatory, analyzed in DiResta, “The Conspiracies Are Coming from Inside the House”; trend additionally archived at “United States Trends | 04/02/2020,” (C) 2022, n.d., https://archive.twitter-trending.com/united-states/04‑02‑2020.
14 Elizabeth Bruenig (@ebruenig), “Clinton’s ’16 campaign manager…,” Twitter, February 4, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20200205111150/https://twitter.com/ebruenig/status/1224710768546996225.
15 Robby Mook (@RobbyMook), “Sorry, folks…,” Twitter, February 4, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20221123092124/https://twitter.com/RobbyMook/status/1224555538790395904.
16 “Fact-Checking Trump’s Claim That Mail-In Ballots Lead to Voter Fraud,” NBC News, April 10, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-pushes-false-claims-about-mail-vote-fraud-here-are-n1180566.
17 “Report: Trump Commission Did Not Find Widespread Voter Fraud,” AP News, April 20, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-us-news-ap-top-news-elections-f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d; Michael Tackett and Michael Wines, “Trump Disbands Commission on Voter Fraud,” New York Times, January 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/us/politics/trump-voter-fraud-commission.html.
18 “Voters Line Up to Cast Ballot in Wisconsin Primary Despite Coronavirus Risk,” NBC News, April 10, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/coronavirus-has-ignited-battle-over-voting-my-mail-here-s-n1178531.
19 Tucker Carlson, “Tom Fitton Explains Why Vote-by-Mail Invites Voter Fraud,” Fox News, April 10, 2020, https://sports.yahoo.com/tom-fitton-explains-why-vote-010533405.html; Tucker Carlson, “Ex-Nevada AG Describes Ballots ‘Piled Up in Apartments and Trash Cans and in Hallways’ Due to Mail-In Voting,” Fox News, May 26, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/media/nevada-adam-laxalt-mail-in-voting-election-fraud; Newt Gingrich, “Newt Gingrich: Democrats Want to Steal November Election—Here’s How,” Fox News, June 7, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/voter-fraud-newt-gingrich; Paul Steinhauser, “Trump Says Surge in Voting by Mail His ‘Biggest Risk,’” Fox News, June 19, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-surge-in-voting-by-mail-my-biggest-risk; John Binder, “Court Brief: 23K Dead Registered Voters Could Get Mail-In Ballots in California,” Breitbart, June 25, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/25/court-brief-23k-dead-registered-voters-could-get-mail-in-ballots-in-california; Julia Musto, “Texas AG Ken Paxton Says There’s ‘a Lot of Voter Fraud’ Involving Mail-In Ballots,” Fox News, June 27, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/media /tx-ag-ken-paxton-mail-in-voting-fraud-supreme-court-win; “West Virginia Mail Carrier Admits Attempted Election Fraud, Says It Comes from AP Reporting,” Fox News, July 12, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/us/west-virginia-mail-carrier-admits-attempted-election-fraud; Gregg Re, “Mail-In Voting Faces Slew of Issues Nationwide, as Emergency USPS Memo Sounds Alarm,” Fox News, July 22, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mail-in-voting-faces-slew-of-issues-nationwide; John Binder, “NPR Analysis: 65,000 Mail-In Votes Thrown Out This Year for Arriving Late,” Breitbart, July 13, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/07/13/npr-analysis-65000-mail-in-votes-thrown-out-this-year-for-arriving-late; John Binder, “Exclusive—Catherine Engelbrecht: Mail-In Voting Is ‘Engineered Chaos’ to Manipulate 2020 Election,” Breitbart, July 19, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/07/19/exclusive-catherine-engelbrecht-mail-voting-engineered-chaos; Charles Creitz, “Tucker Bashes Dems over Claims Trump ‘Stealing Mailboxes’: They’re Making US ‘Even More Paranoid and Fearful,’” Fox News, August 17, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-bashes-democrats-trump-usps-stealing-mailboxes; John Binder, “Democrat Insider Details Mail-In Voting Fraud Operation: ‘This Is a Real Thing,’” Breitbart, August 30, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/30/democrat-details-mass-voter-fraud-operation; John Binder, “Fact Check: DNC Falsely Says ‘Absolutely Zero Difference Between Voting by Mail and Voting Absentee,’” Breitbart, August 20, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/20/fact-check-mail-in-voting-and-absentee-voting-are-not-the-same; “Tucker: Why Silicon Valley Is Doing All It Can to Help the Biden-Harris Ticket,” Fox News, September 4, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/tucker-why-silicon-valley-is-doing-all-it-can-to-help-the-biden-harris-ticket; Talia Kaplan, “Anonymous Democrat Operative’s Account of How Election Fraud Is Allegedly Committed Was ‘Revealing’ and ‘Chilling’: NY Post Reporter,” Fox News, September 1, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/anonymous-dem-operatives-account-of-how-election-fraud-is-allegedly-committed-was-revealing-and-chilling-ny-post-reporter; John Binder, “Georgia Election Officials Receive Referrals for Nearly 100 Cases of Voter Fraud,” Breitbart, September 1, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/13/georgia-election-officials-receive-referrals-100-cases-voter-fraud; John Binder, “Feds: 19 Non-citizens Charged with Voting in 2016 Election in Swing State,” Breitbart, September 3, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/03/feds-19-non-citizens-charged-with-voting-in-2016-election-in-swing-state; Julia Musto, “Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Vetoes ‘Fearmongering’ Bill Targeting Voter Fraud,” Fox News, October 17, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/michigan-governor-gretchen-whitmer-vetoes-bill-targeting-voter-fraud-citing-confusion; Robert Kraychick, “Catherine Engelbrecht: Patriots Must Volunteer Their ‘Eyes and Ears’ for ‘Ballot Security,’” Breitbart, October 21, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/10/21/catherine-engelbrecht-patriots-must-volunteer-their-eyes-and-ears-for-ballot-security; John Binder, “Texas Mayoral Candidate Arrested on 109 Counts of Mail-In Voter Fraud,” Breitbart, October 8, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/08/texas-mayoral-candidate-arrested-on-109-counts-of-mail-in-voter-fraud.
20 Political scientists have observed a “winner effect” among those on the winning side of an election, in which the positive influence of being on the winning side increases trust, perceptions of fairness, and consent to the outcome of an election. In turn, there appear to be negative effects on attitudes about government among citizens on the losing side, which cause concern about the effects of elections on system legitimacy, though it is not clear that those attitudes endure. Betsy Sinclair, Steven S. Smith, and Patrick D. Tucker, “‘It’s Largely a Rigged System’: Voter Confidence and the Winner Effect in 2016,” Political Research Quarterly 71, no. 4 (April 21, 2018): 854–868, https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918768006.
21 Stephen Collinson, “Why Trump’s Talk of a Rigged Vote Is So Dangerous,” CNN Politics, October 19, 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/18/politics/donald-trump-rigged-election/index.html.
22 Jessica Taylor, “Clinton Says She Was ‘Right’ About ‘Vast Russia Conspiracy’; Investigations Ongoing,” NPR, June 1, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/530941011/clinton-says-she-was-right-about-vast-russia-conspiracy-investigations-ongoing.
23 According to Attorney General William Barr’s summary of Robert Mueller’s investigation, they “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Regarding obstruction of justice, the report laid out evidence on both sides without drawing a conclusion, leaving Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to conclude, “The evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Trump reacted to this news by declaring on Twitter on March 24, 2019, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!,” https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1109918388133023744. Mueller refuted this a few months later in testimony before Congress, saying his investigation did not assess “‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term” and that Trump “was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed.” Mueller clarified that the investigation “focused on whether the evidence was sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy. It was not.” “Full Transcript: Mueller Testimony Before House Judiciary, Intelligence Committees,” NBC News, July 25, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/full-transcript-robert-mueller-house-committee-testimony-n1033216.
24 “Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election: Report,” US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, November 10, 2020, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-select-committee-intelligence-united-states-senate-russian-active-measures.
25 Chris Kahn, “Despite Report Findings, Almost Half of Americans Think Trump Colluded with Russia,” Reuters, March 27, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-poll/despite-report-findings-almost-half-of-americans-think-trump-colluded-with-russia-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKCN1R72S0.
26 A survey of evolving election integrity policies ahead of the 2020 election can be found in Chapter 6 of the Election Integrity Partnership final report: “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu/tr171zs0069.
27 Tessa Lyons, “The Three-Part Recipe for Cleaning up Your News Feed,” Meta, May 22, 2018, https://about.fb.com/news/2018/05/inside-feed-reduce-remove-inform.
28 Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac, “Inside Facebook’s Election ‘War Room.’” New York Times, September 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/technology/facebook-election-war-room.html.
29 For example, two right-wing figures, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, were charged in 2020 with telecommunications fraud and intimidating voters after they made tens of thousands of robocalls to minority areas in the Midwest. The calls falsely claimed that if citizens voted by mail, their information would be used for mandatory vaccination programs and given to law enforcement and collection agencies. Christine Hauser, “Two Right-Wing Operatives Plead Guilty in 2020 Robocall Scheme,” New York Times, October 25, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/us/politics/ohio-robocalls-wohl-burkman-guilty.html.
30 For more on “bot armies,” see Samuel C. Woolley and Philip N. Howard, eds., Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
31 “Social Media Influencer Douglass Mackey Convicted of Election Interference in 2016 Presidential Race,” US Department of Justice, March 31, 2023, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/social-media-influencer-douglass-mackey-convicted-election-interference-2016.
32 Colin Moynihan, “Online Troll Named Microchip Tells of Sowing ‘Chaos’ in 2016 Election,” New York Times, March 23, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/nyregion/douglass-mackey-microchip-hillary-clinton-election.html.
33 Scott Shane and Alan Blinder, “Democrats Faked Online Push to Outlaw Alcohol in Alabama Race,” New York Times, January 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/politics/alabama-senate-facebook-roy-moore.html.
34 Reporting about the effort also alleged that the company, New Knowledge, had created a ruse involving a network of Russian Twitter accounts that began to follow candidate Roy Moore, generating mainstream media coverage that Russian bots supported him. The CEO disputed the claim. I did not work at the company at the time and learned of these allegations through media coverage. Scott Shane and Alan Blinder, “Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics,” New York Times, June 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html.
35 Tony Romm and Craig Timberg, “Facebook Suspends Five Accounts, Including That of a Social Media Researcher, for Misleading Tactics in Alabama Election,” Washington Post, December 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/22/facebook-suspends-five-accounts-including-social-media-researcher-misleading-tactics-alabama-election.
36 Matt Osborne, “Swinging a US Senate Race in Alabama, Kremlin-Style Isn’t Illegal, but It Should Be,” Crooks and Liars, January 7, 2019, https://crooksandliars.com/2019/01/how-swing-us-senate-race-alabama-kremlin.
37 Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Facebook Bans Marketing Firm Running ‘Troll Farm’ for Pro-Trump Youth Group,” Washington Post, October 8, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/08/facebook-bans-media-consultancy-running-troll-farm-pro-trump-youth-group.
38 “Analysis of an October 2020 Facebook Takedown Linked to U.S.,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, October 8, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/oct-2020-fb-rally-forge.
39 Priyanjana Bengani, “Hundreds of ‘Pink Slime’ Local News Outlets Are Distributing Algorithmic Stories and Conservative Talking Points,” Columbia Journalism Review, December 18, 2019, https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/hundreds-of-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-are-distributing-algorithmic-stories-conservative-talking-points.php.
40 Davey Alba and Jack Nicas, “As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place,” New York Times, October 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/technology/timpone-local-news-metric-media.html.
41 Sean Hannity (@seanhannity), “Suspicious! Milwaukee Voting…,” Twitter, November 5, 2020, https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/1324355153185656832.
42 Ethan Duran, “Conservative Backed Website Spread Misleading Claims During Election,” Urban Milwaukee, November 12, 2020, https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/11/12/conservative-backed-website-spread-misleading-claims-during-election.
43 Despite their rhetoric, these sites in fact do moderate.
44 Renée DiResta, “Free Speech Is Not the Same as Free Reach,” Wired, August 30, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-free-reach.
45 Jeff Kosseff, “First Amendment Protection for Online Platforms,” Computer Law & Security Review 35, no. 5 (October 1, 2019): 105340, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2019.105340.
46 There have been many assessments by journalists as well as academics discussing the evidence surrounding this persistent theory—for example, Danielle Keats Citron and Mary Ann Franks, “The Internet as a Speech Machine and Other Myths Confounding Section 230 Reform,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 2020, no. 3 (2020), https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol2020/iss1/3; “Despite Cries of Censorship, Conservatives Dominate Social Media,” Politico, October 27, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/26/censorship-conservatives-social-media-432643; Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Why Conservatives Allege Big Tech Is Muzzling Them,” The Atlantic, July 28, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/conservatives-pretend-big-tech-biased-against-them/594916; Mathew Ingram, “Republicans Still Convinced Facebook and Twitter Are Biased Against Them,” Columbia Journalism Review, July 18, 2018, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/tech-biased-against-conservatives.php; Nitasha Tiku, “Leaked Audio Reveals Google’s Efforts to Woo Conservatives,” Wired, December 10, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/leaked-audio-reveals-googles-efforts-woo-conservatives; Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, February 12, 2018, https:/www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuck erberg-2-years-of-hell; Paul M. Barrett and J. Grant Sims, “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives,” New York University, February 2021, https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/bias-report-release-page. One ongoing challenge with assessing it empirically is that access to data on both moderation and curation algorithms is limited by technology platforms.
47 Ferenc Huszár et al., “Algorithmic Amplification of Politics on Twitter,” PNAS 119, no. 1 (December 21, 2021): e2025334119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025334119.
48 “An Update on Senator Kyl’s Review of Potential Anti-conservative Bias,” Meta, June 22, 2020, https://about.fb.com/news/2019/08/update-on-potential-anti-conservative-bias; Kerry Flynn, “Facebook Commissioned a Study of Alleged Anti-conservative Bias. Here’s What It Found,” CNN Business, August 20, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/20/media/facebook-anti-conservative-bias-report/index.html; Jon Kyl, “Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Facebook,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2019, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20190820161311/https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-conservatives-dont-trust-facebook-11566309603.
49 Thomas Kaplan and Sarah Almukhtar, “How Trump Is Outspending Every 2020 Democrat on Facebook,” New York Times, June 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/21/us/politics/trump-2020-facebook-ads.html.
50 Ferenc Huszár et al., “Algorithmic Amplification of Politics on Twitter,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 119, no. 1 (December 21, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025334119.
51 Reem Nadeem, “Most Americans Think Social Media Sites Censor Political Viewpoints,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, August 19, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/08/19/most-americans-think-social-media-sites-censor-political-viewpoints.
52 Renée DiResta, “How the Creator Economy Is Incentivizing Propaganda,” NOEMA, June 7, 2023, https://www.noemamag.com/the-new-media-goliaths.
53 Liam Stack, “Trump Wants Your Tales of Social Media Censorship and Your Contact Info,” New York Times, May 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/donald-trump-twitter-facebook-youtube.html.
54 Oliver Darcy, “‘Circus Show’ Summit: Trump Delivers Meandering Speech to His Digital Army of Supporters at the White House,” CNN Business, July 12, 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/11/tech/trump-speech-social-media-summit/index.html.
55 Kirsten Grind and John D. McKinnon, “Facebook, Twitter Turn to Right-Leaning Groups to Help Referee Political Speech,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-twitter-solicit-outside-groups-often-on-the-right-to-referee-political-speech-11546966779.
56 Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko, “A New Racist Campaign Against Kamala Harris Is Taking Shape,” BuzzFeed, June 28, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/kamala-harris-black-citizenship.
57 Ben Schreckinger, “Trump’s Culture Warriors Go Home.” Politico, November/December 2018, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/29/trump-cernovich-milo-yiannopoulos-richard-spencer-alt-right-2018-221916.
58 “Widower Asks Twitter to Delete Trump’s Conspiracy Tweets,” NBC News, May 27, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/twitter-fact-checks-trump-s-misleading-tweet-mail-voting-n1215151.
59 Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Twitter Labels Trump’s Tweets with a Fact Check for the First Time,” Washington Post, May 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/26/trump-twitter-label-fact-check.
60 Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrumpl), “@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election…,” Twitter, May 27, 2020, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1265427538140188676; Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrumpl), “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!,” Twitter, May 27, 2020, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1265427539008380928.
61 “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship,” White House, May 28, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-preventing-online-censorship.
62 “Remarks by President Trump Announcing an Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship,” White House, May 28, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-announcing-executive-order-preventing-online-censorship.
63 David Shepardson, “Biden Revokes Trump Order That Sought to Limit Social Media Firms’ Protections,” Reuters, May 17, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology/biden-revokes-trump-order-that-sought-limit-social-media-firms-protections-2021-05-15.
64 Anne Applebaum, “Democracy Is Surprisingly Easy to Undermine,” Atlantic, June 17, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/trump-fraud-stop-steal-copycats/619226/.
65 Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conpiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 7–14.
66 Ibid., 34–35, 74.
67 Benkler describes this cycle as an elite-driven mass media disinformation campaign, coming from the top, propagated through Trump’s statements, and spread through right-wing supports (communication teams at the White House and for reelection, the Republican National Convention, Republican officials, right-wing media) and through mainstream media coverage. Cable, network, and local TV and news are more important than some people assume—lots of folks get their political info here rather than from online debates. Yet Trump’s Twitter handle (@RealDonaldTrump) is “on par with the most influential media sites” and is “the most influential source with a right-wing audience orientation.” Trump tweets something, and because he is president, it triggers a wave of coverage across the media ecosystem—including in centrist/mainstream media. The right-wing influencers repeat his claims and develop them; then mainstream media covers this as if it’s a fair, partisan debate rather than disinformation. Yochai Benkler et al., “Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign,” Social Science Research Network, January 1, 2020, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3703701.
68 “Statement from CISA Director Krebs on Security and Resilience of 2020 Elections,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, October 20, 2020, https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/statement-cisa-director-krebs-security-and-resilience-2020-elections.
69 Center for Internet Security, “Reporting Misinformation to the EI-ISAC,” US Election Assistance Commission, https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/partners/EI_ISAC_Reporting_Misinformation_Sheet102820.pdf.
70 The “Long Fuse” report. See Chapter 1 of the EIP final report, “The Long Fuse,” for a full description of outside partnerships and workflows. Online at “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu /tr171zs0069.
71 Casey Nelson, “Postal Service Investigating Mail Found in Greenville Ditch,” 94.3 Jack FM [Green Bay, WI], September 23, 2020, https://943jackfm.com/2020/09/23/postal-service-investigating-mail-found-in-greenville-ditch.
72 Jim Hoft, “BREAKING: US Mail Found in Ditch in Rural Wisconsin—Included Absentee Ballots,” Gateway Pundit, September 23, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20200926103923/https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/breaking-us-mail-found-ditch-greenville-wisconsin-included-absentee-ballots.
73 Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graphika, and Stanford Internet Observatory, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository: Election Integrity Partnership, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu/tr171zs0069.
74 Patrick Marley, “Mail Found in Greenville Ditch Did Not Include Any Wisconsin Ballots,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 1, 2020, https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/10/01/mail-found-greenville-ditch-did-not-include-any-wisconsin-ballots/5883960002.
75 E (@ElijahSchaffer), “If you have further evidence that these are legitimate…,” Twitter, September 25, 2020, https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1309400335988019201.
76 Jim Hoft, “UPDATED: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster—Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up—County Says Returned Ballots from 2018?,” Gateway Pundit, September 29, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20200925152834/https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/exclusive-california-man-finds-thousands-unopened-ballots-garbage-dumpster-workers-quickly-try-cover-photos.
77 Joe Bak-Coleman et al., “Foreign vs Domestic: An Examination of Amplification in a Ballot Misinformation Story,” Election Integrity Partnership, June 24, 2022, https://www.eipartnership.net/2020/vast-majority-of-discarded-ballot-amplification-isnt-from-foreign-sources.
78 Angelo Fichera, “Photos of Recycled Election Materials in California Prompt False Claim,” FactCheck.org, September 29, 2020, https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/photos-of-recycled-election-materials-in-california-prompt-false-claim.
79 Hoft, “UPDATED: California Man Finds THOUSANDS.”
80 “Two Iranian Nationals Charged for Cyber-enabled Disinformation and Threat Campaign Designed to Influence the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election,” US Justice Department, January 25, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-iranian-nationals-charged-cyber-enabled-disinformation-and-threat-campaign-designed.
81 Emma S. Spiro and Kate Starbird, “Rumors Have Rules,” Issues in Science and Technology 39, no. 3 (Spring 2023): 47–49, https://doi.org/10.58875/CXGL5395.
82 Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, “Rumor, Gossip and Urban Legends,” Diogenes 54, no. 1 (February 1, 2007): 19–35, https://doi.org/10.1177/0392192107073433.
83 “Election Security Rumor vs. Reality,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, n.d., https://www.cisa.gov/rumor-vs-reality#rumor18.
84 One interesting thing about the repetitive pathways we observed in our 2020 analysis of election rumors was that even sensational, blatantly conspiratorial ideas—CIA supercomputers changing votes, MaidenGate, other outlandish-seeming conspiracy theories—appeared to have already gone from something that one might expect to fall under complex contagion (something that might be a reputational concern for the influencer propagating it) and instead moved via simple-contagion pathways, suggesting the presence of an echo chamber. The influencers behaved as if the audience was already receptive even to truly outlandish claims, and indeed there was little sign of pushback to any claim of fraud. In the case of Sharpiegate, for example, the primed audience no longer needed extensive additional confirmation or evidence to believe that deliberate fraud had occurred, and so the narrative did move from the periphery to the influencer, but then was quickly boosted by a series of credentialed, large influencers.
85 Kate Starbird, Renée DiResta, and Matt DeButts, “Influence and Improvisation: Participatory Disinformation During the 2020 US Election,” Social Media and Society 9, no. 2 (2023): 205630512311779–205630512311779, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177943.
86 Jean-Noel Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretation, and Necessity (London: Routledge, 2013), 69.
87 Brian Slodysko, “How Trump’s MAGA Movement Helped a 29-Year-Old Activist Become a Millionaire,” ABC News, October 10, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trumps-maga-movement-helped-29-year-activist-become-103849365.
88 University of Washington research scholar Michael Caulfield has written about this process extensively in a series of case studies on his blog: Michael Caulfield, “Tropes and Networked Digital Activism #1: Trope-Field Fit,” Hapgood, June 12, 2021, https://hapgood.us/2021/06/12/participatory-propaganda-tropes-and-trope-field-fit-part-one. For more of Caulfield’s work on how tropes and evidence are related, see Charlie Warzel, “‘Evidence Maximalism’ Is How the Internet Argues Now,” Atlantic, February 8, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive /2024/02/evidence-maximalism-conspiracy-theories-taylor-swift/677390/.
89 Natalie Dagenhardt, “Maidengate Scandal Breaks: Democrats Allegedly Registered Women Under Their Previous Names,” Right Journalism, November 11, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20201111150137/https://www.rightjournalism.com/maidengate-scandal-breaks-democrats-allegedly-registered-women-under-their-previous-names.
90 For an overview of “Sharpiegate” in Maricopa County, see Rachel Leingang and McKenzie Sadeghi, “Fact Check: Arizona Election Departments Confirm Sharpies Can Be Used on Ballots,” USA Today, November 5, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/04/fact-check-sharpiegate-controversy-arizona-false-claim/6164820002.
91 Ibid.
92 Bill Goodykoontz, “Fox News Correctly Called Arizona for Joe Biden a Year Ago. That Night Changed Everything,” Arizona Republic, November 3, 2021, https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/media/2021/11/03/fox-news-biden-arizona-call-election-night/8544699002.
93 Meg Warner et al., “Presidential Election Results 2020,” CNN Politics, November 23, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/election-results-and-news-11-03-20/index.html.
94 Fox announces that Biden has won Arizona at 11:20 p.m. EST. Trump tweets at 12:45 a.m., “I will be making a statement tonight. A big WIN!” and again around 1:25 a.m., “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election,” which Twitter labels shortly after. He spoke just before 2:30 a.m. EST. Christina Wilkie, “Trump Tries to Claim Victory Even as Ballots Are Being Counted in Several States—NBC Has Not Made a Call,” CNBC, November 6, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/trump-tries-to-claim-victory-even-as-ballots-are-being-counted-in-several-states-nbc-has-not-made-a-call.html.
95 David Bauder, Randall Chase, and Geoff Mulvihill, “Fox, Dominion Reach $787.5M Settlement over False Election Claims,” AP News, April 20, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-trump-2020-0ac71f75acfacc52ea80b3e747fb0afe.
96 Olivia Rubin, “What Fox News Hosts Allegedly Said Privately Versus On-Air About False Election Fraud Claims,” ABC News, April 24, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fox-news-hosts-allegedly-privately-versus-air-false/story?id=97662551.
97 Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graphika, and Stanford Internet Observatory, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository: Election Integrity Partnership, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu/tr171zs0069.
98 Joey Garrison and Jessica Guynn, “Facebook Readying ‘Break-Glass’ Tools to Restrict Content if Violence Erupts After Election,” USA Today, September 23, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/22/election-2020-facebook-has-break-glass-measures-if-violence-erupts/5866803002.
99 Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023), 214.
100 Bauder, Chase, and Mulvihill, “Fox, Dominion Reach $787.5M Settlement.”
101 Davey Alba, “No Proof People Stole Maiden Names to Vote,” New York Times, November 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/technology/no-proof-maiden-names-vote.html.
102 Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, Dennis Montgomery, and Steve Bannon, “What Is THE HAMMER What Is The Scorecard War Room Pandemic Episode 470,” November 2, 2020, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/what-is-the-hammer-what-is-the-scorecard-war-room-pandemic-episode.
103 Nicole Leaver and Joan Donovan, “Viral Slogan: Hammer and Scorecard,” Media Manipulation Casebook, February 10, 2021, https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/viral-slogan-hammer-and-scorecard.
104 Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad,” New York Post, October 14, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad.
105 Fox News reportedly passed on the story and, interestingly, even the New York Post attributed the explosive story to two reporters who may not have been the ones to actually author it. According to two anonymous Post employees who spoke with the New York Times, the article was written by staff reporter Bruce Golding, who didn’t want his byline used because he “had concerns over the article’s credibility.” Katie Robertson, “New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report amid Newsroom Doubts,” New York Times, October 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-post-hunter-biden.html.
106 The Hunter Biden laptop story was out of scope for EIP because it didn’t relate to voting or election delegitimization—but I found it interesting as an example of two companies taking different moderation approaches to the same incident. I thought Facebook had made the right call by reducing distribution while allowing the story to remain and be shared by users and that Twitter had made the wrong one. The calls were made under the “hacked materials” policy. Blocking the nudes seemed fully reasonable, under the hacked materials policy as well as from an individual privacy standpoint—there is no free speech argument that justifies propagating someone else’s leaked private photos—but blocking the sharing of the newspaper URL was the wrong call. Twitter, responding to outcry, reversed the call several hours later.
107 “‘This Will Be Awesome’: Musk Leaks Twitter’s Hunter Biden Files,” Politico, December 2, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/02/musk-leak-twitter-hunter-biden-files-00072015.
108 Jessica Bursztynsky, “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Says Blocking New York Post Story Was ‘Wrong,’” CNBC, October 16, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/16/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-says-blocking-post-story-was-wrong.html.
109 Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac, and Jane Lytvynenko, “How Facebook Failed to Prevent Stop the Steal,” BuzzFeed News, April 22, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-failed-stop-the-steal-insurrection.
110 Jessica Guynn, “Facebook Deploys Emergency Measures to Curb Misinformation as Nation Awaits Election Results,” USA Today, November 5, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/11/05/facebook-election-misinformation-crackdown-emergency-measures-trump/6182001002; Horwitz, Broken Code, 220.
111 Jessica Guynn, “Facebook Shuts Down Pro-Trump ‘Stop the Steal’ Group over ‘Worrying Calls for Violence,’” Time, November 5, 2020, https://time.com/5907902/stop-the-steal-facebook-group-trump-election.
112 Ryan Mac, Craig Silverman, and Jane Lytvynenko, “Facebook Stopped Employees from Reading an Internal Report About Its Role in the Insurrection. You Can Read It Here,” BuzzFeed News, April 26, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/full-facebook-stop-the-steal-internal-report.
113 Mac, Silverman, and Lytvynenko, “Facebook Stopped Employees from Reading an Internal Report.”
114 Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac, and Jane Lytvynenko, “Facebook Knows It Was Used to Help Incite the Capitol Insurrection,” BuzzFeed News, April 21, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-failed-stop-the-steal-insurrection.
115 Silverman, Mac, and Lytvynenko, “Facebook Knows It Was Used.”
116 Teo Armus, “A ‘Stop the Steal’ Organizer, Now Banned by Twitter, Said Three GOP Lawmakers Helped Plan His D.C. Rally,” Washington Post, January 13, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/13/ali-alexander-capitol-biggs-gosar/.
117 “How the ‘Stop the Steal’ Movement Outwitted Facebook Ahead of the Jan. 6 Insurrection,” NPR, October 22, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048543513/facebook-groups-jan-6-insurrection.
118 “View of Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization,” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 2 (2022): 1–49, https://journalqd.org/article/view/3137/2635.
119 Top twenty-one spreaders of election misinformation on Twitter: Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graphika, and Stanford Internet Observatory, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository: Election Integrity Partnership, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu/tr171zs0069.
120 “Project Veritas #BallotHarvesting Amplification,” Election Integrity Partnership, September 29, 2020, https://www.eipartnership.net/2020/project-veritas-ballotharvesting.
121 Ian Kennedy et al., “Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization,” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 2 (2022), https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.013.
122 Yochai Benkler, Robert Farris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
123 Renée DiResta, “The Misinformation Campaign Was Distinctly One-Sided,” The Atlantic, March 15, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/right-wing-propagandists-were-doing-something-unique/618267. To understand the dynamics of relative engagement with misinformation news sources across the political spectrum, see Laura Edelson et al., “Understanding Engagement with U.S. (Mis)Information News Sources on Facebook,” ICM ’21: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference, November 2021, 444–463, https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3487552.3487859.
124 Benkler et al., “Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign,” Berkman Klein Center, October 2, 2020, https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fraud-Disinformation-2020.
125 University of Washington Center for an Informed Public professor Kate Starbird describes the concept of evidence being assembled to fit an existing frame in a February 3, 2021, Usenix Enigma conference talk titled “Online Rumors, Misinformation and Disinformation: The Perfect Storm of Covid-19 and Election2020,” https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/starbird.
126 Starbird, DiResta, and DeButts, “Influence and Improvisation.”
127 Ryan Quinn, “Conservatives Sue, Investigate Disinformation Researchers,” Inside Higher Ed, June 23, 2023, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2023/06/23/stanford-u-wash-faculty-fought-disinformation-got-sued; Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn, “These Academics Studied Falsehoods Spread by Trump. Now the GOP Wants Answers,” Washington Post, June 6, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/06/disinformation-researchers-congress-jim-jordan.
128 “Addressing False Claims and Misperceptions of the UW Center for an Informed Public’s Research,” Center for an Informed Public, March 16, 2023, https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/03/16/uw-cip-election-integrity-partnership-research-claims.
129 After the election, some Stanford Internet Observatory researchers examined platform moderation of content that we had tracked via the Election Integrity Partnership’s Jira ticketing system. See Samantha Bradshaw, Shelby Grossman, and Miles McCain, “An Investigation of Social Media Labeling Decisions Preceding the 2020 U.S. Election,” PloS One 18, no. 11 (2023): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289683.
130 “Summary of Investigative Findings,” Tech Policy Press, n.d., accessed September 3, 2023, https://techpolicy.press/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/J6-Committee-Draft-Social-Media-Report-TPP.pdf.
131 “Far-Right Influencer Known as ‘Baked Alaska’ Sentenced over Capitol Attack,” The Guardian, January 10, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/10/baked-alaska-anthime-gionet-sentenced-capitol-attack.
132 Craig Timberg, “Gallows or Guillotines? The Chilling Debate on TheDonald.win Before the Capitol Siege,” Washington Post, April 15, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/15/thedonald-capitol-attack-advance-democracy.
133 Jonathan A. Greenblatt, “No One Is Born an Extremist. Jan. 6 Shows Virtually Anyone Can Be Swept Up by Hate Groups,” USA Today, January 6, 2022, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/01/06/january-6-hate-groups-adl-research/8995472002.
134 Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
135 Zicheng Cheng, Hugo Marcos-Marne, and Homero Gil de Zúñiga, “Birds of a Feather Get Angrier Together: Social Media News Use and Social Media Political Homophily as Antecedents of Political Anger,” Political Behavior, March 6, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09864-z.
136 Lyn Van Swol, Sangwon Lee, and Rachel Hutchins, “The Banality of Extremism: The Role of Group Dynamics and Communication of Norms in Polarization on January 6,” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice 26, no. 3 (2022): 239–251, https://doi.org/10.1037/gdn0000180.
137 As Van Swol, Lee, and Hutchins put it, “The fact that participants posted themselves on social media participating in the attack, without consideration of the consequences, suggests just how embedded they were in the norms of their network and isolated from dissent” (ibid.).
138 See P. B. Paulus and J. B. Kenworthy, “The Crowd Dynamics and Collective Stupidity of the January 6 Riot: Theoretical Analyses and Prescriptions for a Collectively Wiser Future,” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 26, no. 3 (2022): 199–219, https://doi.org/10.1037/gdn0000184: “Even with a limited security force, the crowd did not surge through the police lines until some crowd members (apparently instigated by certain crowd elements such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers) were able to breach the police lines with little consequence. The restriction of movement of crowd members on the Capitol grounds was thus disinhibited due to the lack of serious consequences. Contagion and imitation followed.” Paulus and Kenworthy examined the multifaceted psychological dynamics of mobilization in depth: “The crowd members were mobilized for action by both the social media process and the rally speakers to go to the Capitol to protest the election and demand a reassessment of the outcome. At that point, social control factors become the key elements that determine the outcome of the collective movement or action. Respected leaders inside and outside of the collective, the press, and clear messages from security elements or officials about the appropriate and inappropriate collective actions and consequences for violations can help minimize the potential for violent and destructive actions. An important factor in the occurrence of a hostile outburst is leadership. The leadership may be unintentional when the individual behaviors of some group members lead others to follow. In the case of the breaching of the police lines, the simple act of some in the crowd breaking through the lines may have led others to follow.”
139 Maria Polletta and Andrew Oxford, “Arizona GOP Asks Followers If They’re Willing to Die in Effort to Overturn Election Results,” AZ Central, December 8, 2020, https://www.azcentral.com /story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/08/arizona-republican-party-asks-if-followers-die-election-president-donald-trump/6488952002/.
140 Zachary Petrizzo, “‘Stop the Steal’ Leader Threatens ‘Something Bad’ Might Happen to D.C. Hotel After It Closes Doors to MAGA March,” Daily Dot, December 29, 2020, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/stop-the-steal-something-bad-hotel-harrington.
141 Daniel Lippman, “Facebook Bans Stop the Steal Organizer Ali Alexander,” Politico. January 12, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/12/facebook-bans-stop-the-steal-organizer-ali-alexander-458267.
142 Will Sommer, “‘Stop the Steal’ Organizer in Hiding After Denying Blame for Riot,” Daily Beast, January 10, 2021, https://www.thedailybeast.com/stop-the-steal-organizer-in-hiding-after-denying-blame-for-riot.
143 Sommer, “’Stop the Steal’ Organizer in Hiding.”
144 Derek Hawkins, Sarah Ellison, and Blair Guild, “What Tucker Carlson Said About Trump in Private Texts vs. on Fox News,” Washington Post, March 9, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/03/09/tucker-carlson-trump-texts-fox-news.
145 Brian Fung, “Parler Has Now Been Booted by Amazon, Apple and Google,” CNN Business, January 9, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/09/tech/parler-suspended-apple-app-store/index.html.
146 Alexander posted this to his Telegram channel on October 30, 2022, following the election; the post can be found at https://t.me/alialexander/5435.
147 “Post-election Lawsuits Related to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election,” Wikipedia, November 28, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_U.S._presidential_election.
148 Jennifer Agiest and Ariel Edwards-Levy, “CNN Poll: Most Republicans Care More About Picking a 2024 GOP Nominee Who Agrees with Them on Issues Than One Who Can Beat Biden,” CNN Politics, March 14, 2023, https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/14/politics/cnn-poll-republicans-2024-nominee/index.html.
149 Ryan Quinn, “Conservatives Sue, Investigate Disinformation Researchers,” Inside Higher Ed, June 23, 2023, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2023/06/23/stanford-u-wash-faculty-fought-disinformation-got-sued; Nix and Menn, “These Academics Studied Falsehoods Spread by Trump.”
150 “Addressing False Claims and Misperceptions of the UW Center for an Informed Public’s Research,” Center for an Informed Public, March 16, 2023, https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/03/16/uw-cip-election-integrity-partnership-research-claims.
CHAPTER 6: AGENTS OF INFLUENCE
1 Matt Kodama, “#ColumbianChemicals Hoax: Trolling the Gulf Coast for Deceptive Patterns,” Recorded Future blog, June 12, 2015, https://www.recordedfuture.com/blog/columbianchemicals-hoax-analysis.
2 Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times, June 2, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html.
3 John Borthwick, “Media Hacking,” Medium, March 7, 2015, https://render.betaworks.com/media-hacking-3b1e350d619c.
4 Kodama, “#ColumbianChemicals Hoax.”
5 Borthwick, “Media Hacking.”
6 Chen, “The Agency.”
7 Haley Ott, Kerry Breen, and Duarte Dias, “What Is the Wagner Group, and Who Is Yevgeny Prigozhin? What to Know About the Russian Private Military Company,” CBS News, August 24, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wagner-group-who-is-yevgeny-prigozhin-russia-mercenary-private-military-company.
8 Associated Press, “A Russian Businessman Linked to Putin Admits to U.S. Election Meddling,” NPR, November 7, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/11/07/1134878028/yevgeny-prigozhin-russia-election-interference-putin.
9 “Amid Infighting Among Putin’s Lieutenants, Head of Mercenary Force Appears to Take a Step Too Far,” AP News, June 23, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/putin-russia-ukraine-war-prigozhin-infighting-0e051f0a43522f57ef1810a8b03f6e62.
10 Patrick Smith, “Prigozhin Dismissed Security Fears Days Before Plane Crash, Video Appears to Show,” NBC News, August 31, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/prigozhin-dismissed-security-fears-days-plane-crash-video-appears-show-rcna102699.
11 Nicholas J. Cull, “Master of American Propaganda: How George Creel Sold the Great War to America, and America to the World,” PBS, accessed September 7, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/the-great-war-master-of-american-propaganda. Bernays worked alongside award-winning storytellers, artists, and advertisers, as well as national celebrities and around seventy-five thousand local citizens, who were prepped with pro-war talking points to deliver in presentations at community centers.
12 Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2020).
13 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
14 Renée DiResta and Joshua Goldstein, “Full-Spectrum Propaganda in the Social Media Era,” working paper currently under review. Available at http://reneediresta.com/fullspectrumpropaganda.pdf.
15 Philip N. Howard, “Why Governments Use Broadcast TV and Dissidents Use Twitter,” The Atlantic, June 14, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/why-governments-use-broadcast-tv-and-dissidents-use-twitter/276896.
16 In their study of the Tahrir Square protests, Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson found that Facebook and other social media platforms were critical to driving protest participation and spreading information that was not controlled by politicians. Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahrir Square,” Journal of Communication 62, no. 2 (March 6, 2012): 363–379, https://doi.org/1460-2466.2012.01629.
17 David Patrikarakos, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
18 For more on the concept of computational propaganda, see Samuel C. Woolley and Philip N. Howard, eds., Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
19 Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel, “Pentagon Orders Review of Its Overseas Social Media Campaigns,” New York Times, September 19, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/us/politics/pentagon-social-media.html.
20 Niko Vorobyov, “Meduza Editor: ‘Russia’s State Media Is Terrifyingly Effective,’” Aljazeera, April 7, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/7/meduza-editor-kovalyov-there-is-no-media-landscape-in-russia.
21 “About,” Facebook, September 2, 2009, https://www.facebook.com/cctvcom/about_profile _transparency.
22 Renée DiResta and John Perrino, “U.S. Influence Operations: The Military’s Resurrected Digital Campaign for Hearts and Minds,” Lawfare, October 11, 2022, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/us-influence-operations-militarys-resurrected-digital-campaign-hearts-and-minds.
23 Michael J. Waller, “Putin Propaganda Picks Up Ex-Pentagon Contractors,” February 11, 2016, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20160317024555/http://aminewswire.com/stories/510662541-putin-propaganda-picks-up-ex-pentagon-contractors.
24 Graphika and Stanford Internet Observatory, “Unheard Voice,” Graphika, August 24, 2022, https://graphika.com/reports/unheard-voice.
25 Lizzie Dearden, “Isis Using Kittens and Honey Bees in Bid to Soften Image in Dabiq Propaganda Magazine,” The Independent, August 2, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-kittens-honey-bees-dabiq-propaganda-recruits-photo-soften-image-terror-a7168586.html.
26 A term originating with anarchists of the First International to refer to a propaganda strategy in which an atrocity is committed to raise awareness of a group and its mission—specifically, to incite a revolution. Constance Bantman, “Introduction,” in The French Anarchists in London: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 1–12.
27 J. M. Berger, “The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda: The Paris Attack and Social Media,” Brookings, January 27, 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-evolution-of-terrorist-propaganda-the-paris-attack-and-social-media.
28 J. M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan, “The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and Describing the Population of ISIS Supporters on Twitter,” Brookings, March 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/isis_twitter_census_berger_morgan.pdf; “Combating Violent Extremism,” Twitter Blog, February 5, 2016, https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2016/combating-violent-extremism.html.
29 Jenna McLaughlin, “Twitter Is Not at War with ISIS. Here’s Why,” Mother Jones, November 18, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/twitter-isis-war-ban-speech.
30 Julia Greenberg, “Why Facebook and Twitter Can’t Just Wipe Out ISIS Online,” Wired, November 21, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/11/facebook-and-twitter-face-tough-choices-as-isis-exploits-social-media.
31 Caleb Garling, “Twitter C.E.O. Dick Costolo on Receiving Death Threats from ISIS,” Vanity Fair, October 9, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/tech/2014/10/twitter-ceo-death-threats-isis.
32 Tobias Salinger, “ISIS Supporters Celebrate Paris Attacks on Twitter with Hateful Hashtag ‘Paris Is Burning’: Reports,” New York Daily News, November 14, 2015, https://www.nydailynews.com/2015/11/14/isis-supporters-celebrate-paris-attacks-on-twitter-with-hateful-hashtag-paris-is-burning-reports.
33 Nabeelah Jaffer, “The Secret World of Isis Brides: ‘U Dnt Hav 2 Pay 4 ANYTHING If u r Wife of a Martyr,’” The Guardian, June 24, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/24/isis-brides-secret-world-jihad-western-women-syria.
34 Rita Katz, “The State Department’s Twitter War with ISIS Is Embarrassing,” Time, September 16, 2014, https://time.com/3387065/isis-twitter-war-state-department.
35 This campaign of the Center for Strategic Counterrorism Communications began at the end of 2013, with an affiliated YouTube channel and Facebook page launching in summer of 2014. Alberto M. Fernandez, “Here to Stay and Growing: Combating ISIS Propaganda Networks,” Brookings, October 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/is-propaganda_web_english.pdf.
36 Jeff Giesea, “It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare,” Defence Strategic Communications 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 67–75, https://doi.org/10.30966/2018.riga.1.4.
37 Berger, “The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda.”
38 DiResta and Goldstein, “Full-Spectrum Propaganda in the Social Media Era.”
39 Marc Wortman, “The Fake British Radio Show That Helped Defeat the Nazis,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 28, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fake-british-radio-show-helped-defeat-nazis-180962320.
40 Ibid.
41 Rid, Active Measures, 12.
42 US Department of State, Active Measures: A Report on the Substance and Process of Anti-U.S. Disinformation and Propaganda Campaigns, Institute of World Politics, August 1986, https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Soviet-Active-Measures-Substance-and-Process-of-Anti-US-Disinformation-August-1986.pdf.
43 Peter Steiner, “Nobody Knows You’re a Dog” [cartoon], New Yorker, July 1993.
44 The Senate Intelligence Committee bipartisan leadership jointly invited several researchers to pull together teams and examine the data sets. We were each unaware of the composition of other teams, to ensure that the work was done independently in light of the sensitive political nature of the election-related aspect of the material. The work was not a paid consulting engagement but rather a technical advisory relationship. The findings of the reports subsequently informed the Senate Intelligence Committee’s own four-part report investigating Russian interference into the 2016 election. The announcement of our work can be at “New Reports Shed Light on Internet Research Agency’s Social Media Tactics,” US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, December 17, 2018, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/press/new-reports-shed-light-internet-research-agency%E2%80%99s-social-media-tactics. For the second volume of the report, in which the majority of it appears, see “Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2: Russia’s Use of Social Media with Additional Views,” US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf.
45 The cooking forum poster, “Alice Norton,” an “assistant cook” whose profile said she lived in New York, claimed her family had been poisoned by the turkey and her son was hospitalized. This message reached Twitter within a few hours, via nearly one hundred IRA-affiliated Twitter accounts that linked to the post and to a Wikipedia page that had just been created, called “2015 New York Poisoned Turkey Incident.” Wikipedia volunteers quickly took the page down for violating policies, but that same day a news story was posted on the domain ProudtobeBlack.com, a URL registered only a month prior, claiming that two hundred New Yorkers were hospitalized due to poisoned Walmart turkey supplied by Koch’s Farm and that their tip came through “our trusted sources in NYPD.” The claims were investigated by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which had no records of any food poisoning episodes, and an executive at Koch Turkey Farm explained that they don’t even sell turkeys to Walmart. Rob Barry, “Russian Trolls Tweeted Disinformation Long Before U.S. Election,” Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/graphics/russian-trolls-tweeted-disinformation-long-before-u-s-election.
46 Darren L. Linvill and Patrick L. Warren, “Troll Factories: Manufacturing Specialized Disinformation on Twitter,” Political Communication 37, no. 4 (February 5, 2020): 447–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1718257.
47 Deen Freelon et al., “Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation,” Social Science Computer Review 40, no. 3 (April 7, 2020): 560–578, https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320914853.
48 Black women, frequent targets of online trolling, had begun to talk about accounts that attempted to manipulate the Black community, particularly around the time of Gamergate. They used the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing to call attention to provocateurs that they suspected to be racist trolls from 4chan (later 8chan); subsequent research into IRA data suggested that some of the activity was additionally boosted, and joined, by Russian trolls who took advantage of real racial tension and shifting norms around online harassment. See, for example, comments by analyst Shireen Mitchell in this New York Times analysis of Russian troll messaging around the Women’s March: Ellen Berry, “How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step,” New York Times, September 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html; for coverage of online impersonation strategies targeting Black women, see Morgan Jerkins, “Black or Bot? The Long, Sordid History of Co-opting Blackness Online,” Mother Jones, September-October 2022, https://www.motherjones.com/media/2022/09/disinformation-russia-trolls-bots-black-culture-blackness-ukraine-twitter.
49 Renée DiResta et al., “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” U.S. Senate Documents, October 2019, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/senatedocs/2.
50 Ben Popken, “Russian Trolls Duped Global Media and Nearly 40 Celebrities,” NBC News, November 3, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/trump-other-politicians-celebs-shared-boosted-russian-troll-tweets-n817036.
51 Digital Forensic Research lab investigation into the troll account @TEN_GOP: Ben Nimmo, “How a Russian Troll Fooled America,” Medium, November 14, 2017, https://medium.com/dfrlab/how-a-russian-troll-fooled-america-80452a4806d1.
52 DiResta et al., “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency.”
53 Ibid.
54 Punctuation is presented as in the original content; it is not mistyped.
55 Chris Joyner, “Watchdog: Russian Trolls Meddled at Stone Mountain Protests,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 15, 2018, https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/watchdog-russian-trolls-meddled-stone-mountain-protests/SQMhxrKgxVbsQ2ISIbyukN.
56 Todd J. Gillman, “Russian Trolls Orchestrated 2016 Clash at Houston Islamic Center, New Senate Intel Report Recalls,” Dallas Morning News, October 8, 2019, https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2019/10/08/russian-trolls-orchestrated-2016-clash-houston-islamic-center-senate-intel-report-says.
57 Renée DiResta, Shelby Grossman, and Alexandra Siegel, “In-House vs. Outsourced Trolls: How Digital Mercenaries Shape State Influence Strategies,” Political Communication 39, no. 2 (2022): 222–253, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2021.1994065.
58 “Heart of Texas” Facebook page post from February 2, 2016. It received 822 likes, 242 shares, and 509 comments.
59 DiResta and Goldstein, “Full-Spectrum Propaganda in the Social Media Era”; S. Bradshaw and P. Howard, “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” Working Paper no. 2017.12, Computational Propaganda Research Project, 2017, https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cef7e8d9-27bf-4ea5-9fd6-855209b3e1f6.
60 Catherine Bennette, “The Pro-Russian Propaganda Hiding in Your TikTok Feed,” The Observers, January 10, 2021, https://observers.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20211001-the-pro-russian-propaganda-hiding-in-your-tiktok-feed.
61 Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 484–501, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055417000144.
62 Ben Nimmo, “How MH17 Gave Birth to the Modern Russian Spin Machine,” Foreign Policy, September 29, 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/29/how-mh17-gave-birth-to-the-modern-russian-spin-machine-putin-ukraine.
63 Joel Gunter and Olga Robinson, “Sergei Skripal and the Russian Disinformation Game,” BBC, September 9, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45454142; Joby Warrick and Anton Troianovski, “How a Powerful Russian Propaganda Machine Chips Away at Western Notions of Truth,” Washington Post, December 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/national-security/russian-propaganda-skripal-salisbury.
64 Shelby Grossman et al., “Blame It on Iran, Qatar, and Turkey: An Analysis of a Twitter and Facebook Operation Linked to Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia,” Stanford Internet Observatory, April 2, 2020, https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/20200402_blame_it_on_iran_qatar_and_turkey_v2_0.pdf.
65 Hadeel Al Sayegh, “Saudi’s Kingdom Holding Company to Maintain Twitter Stake,” Reuters, October 28, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-maintain-twitter-stake-2022-10-28.
66 Katie Benner et al., “Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider,” New York Times, October 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/us/politics/saudi-image-campaign-twitter.html; Kevin Collier, “Former Twitter Employee Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for Spying for Saudi Arabia,” NBC News, December 14, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/former-twitter-employee-sentenced-three-years-prison-spying-saudi-arab-rcna61384.
67 For example, the Russian newspaper RIA FAN, owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, for quite some time was publishing articles that quoted fake people—troll accounts offering “man-on-the-street” commentary—run by other entities tied to Prigozhin. This embedding of inauthentic accounts became something of a lead-generation tool for the discovery of new networks of troll accounts. Renée DiResta et al., “In Bed with Embeds: How a Network Tied to IRA Operations Created Fake ‘Man on the Street’ Content Embedded in News Articles,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, December 2, 2021, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/publication/bed-embeds.
68 This is the title of Pomerantzev’s 2014 memoir about his time in Russia: Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).
69 Ryan Ho Kilpatrick, “‘An Eye For an Eye’: Hong Kong Protests Get Figurehead in Woman Injured by Police,” The Guardian, August 16, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/an-eye-for-an-eye-hong-kong-protests-get-figurehead-in-woman-injured-by-police.
70 Renée DiResta et al., “Telling China’s Story: The Chinese Communist Party’s Campaign to Shape Global Narratives,” Stanford Internet Observatory, July 20, 2020, https://fsi.stanford.edu/publication/telling-chinas-story.
71 Jessica Brandt and Bret Schafer, “How China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomats Use and Abuse Twitter,” Brookings, October 28, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-chinas-wolf-warrior-diplomats-use-and-abuse-twitter.
72 Erika Kinetz, “Army of Fake Fans Boosts China’s Wolf Warriors on Social Media,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 13, 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/army-of-fake-fans-boosts-china-s-wolf-warriors-on-social-media-20210513-p57rfo.html.
73 A passage in the book LikeWar summarizes the phenomenon of dubious followers on Chinese state media accounts: “In 2016, internet users had a collective chuckle when People’s Daily, the main Chinese propaganda outlet, launched a Facebook page that swiftly attracted 18 million ‘likes,’ despite Facebook being banned in China. This included more than a million ‘fans’ in Myanmar (out of the then 7 million Facebook users in that country), who instantly decided to ‘like’ China.” A high follower count is perceived as a way to establish credibility by signaling to potential readers that the content has many other existing readers, which is required for making a dent in the crowded social media ecosystem. P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Boston: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 139.
74 Renée DiResta, Josh A. Goldstein, and Shelby Grossman, “Middle East Influence Operations: Observations Across Social Media Takedowns,” Project on Middle East Political Science, August 2021, https://pomeps.org/middle-east-influence-operations-observations-across-social-media-takedowns.
75 Nicolas Six, “TikTok Used to Promote Russian Mercenary Group Wagner,” Le Monde, December 1, 2022, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2022/12/01/tiktok-used-to-promote-russian-mercenary-group-wagner_6006282_13.html.
76 Morgan Meaker, “How Ukraine Is Winning the Propaganda War,” Wired, May 13, 2022, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ukraine-propaganda-war.
77 Valerie Hopkins, “In Video a Defiant Zelensky Says, ‘We Are Here,’” New York Times, February 25, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/world/europe/zelensky-speech-video.html.
78 Steve Inskeep and Odette Yousef, “Russia Claims U.S. Labs Across Ukraine Are Secretly Developing Biological Weapons,” NPR, March 22, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/03/22/1087991730/russia-claims-u-s-labs-across-ukraine-are-secretly-developing-biological-weapons.
79 Feng Qingyin, “US Owes World an Explanation on Bio-Labs,” Global Times, March 10, 2022, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/1254588.shtml.
80 Hua Chunying (@SpokespersonCHN), “US’ Bio-Web,” Twitter, March 17, 2022, 3:25 a.m., https://twitter.com/SpokespersonCHN/status/1504358120461635587?s=20.
81 Deng Zijun, “What Is the US Hiding in the Biolabs Discovered in Ukraine?,” Global Times, March 17, 2022, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/1255164.shtml.
82 Linda Qiu, “Theory About U.S.-Funded Bioweapons Labs in Ukraine Is Unfounded,” New York Times, March 11, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/us/politics/us-bioweapons-ukraine-misinformation.html.
83 Mara Hvistendahl and Alexey Kovalev, “Hacked Russian Files Reveal Propaganda Agreement with China,” The Intercept, December 30, 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/12/30/russia-china-news-media-agreement.
84 Zeba Siddiqui and Christopher Bing, “Latin American Election Influence Operation Linked to Miami Marketing Firm,” Reuters, May 4, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/latin-american-election-influence-operation-linked-miami-marketing-firm-2023-05-04.
85 News Wires, “Israeli Firm ‘Boasted’ of Meddling in More Than 30 Elections Worldwide,” France 24, January 15, 2023, https://www.france24.com/en/technology/20230215-israeli-firm-boasted-of-meddling-in-more-than-30-elections-worldwide.
86 Maurice Jakesch et al., “Trend Alert: A Cross-Platform Organization Manipulated Twitter Trends in the Indian General Election,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, no. CSCW2 (October 18, 2021): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1145/3479523.
87 Pranav Dixit, “Modi’s Political Party Creates Abusive Social Media Campaigns and Breeds Internet Trolls, Claims New Book,” BuzzFeed News, December 27, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/bjp-trolled-indians; Karnika Kohli, “Congress vs BJP: The Curious Case of Trolls and Politics,” Times of India, October 11, 2013, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/congress-vs-bjp-the-curious-case-of-trolls-and-politics/articleshow/23970818.cms.
88 Samuel Woolley, Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 33.
89 Nathaniel Gleicher, “Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior and Spam from India and Pakistan,” Meta, April 1, 2019, https://about.fb.com/news/2019/04/cib-and-spam-from-india-pakistan.
90 Woolley, Manufacturing Consensus, 35.
91 Zoya Mateen, “Jack Dorsey: India Threatened to Shut Twitter and Raid Employees,” BBC, June 13, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65886825.
92 Julia C. Wong and Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Facebook Planned to Remove Fake Accounts in India—Until It Realized a BJP Politician Was Involved,” The Guardian, April 15, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/15/facebook-india-bjp-fake-accounts; Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz, “Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide with Indian Politics,” Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346.
93 Think of the GAN process as a pair of AI artists working against each other. One AI, called the “generator,” tries to create something that looks real, like a lifelike photo of a person. The other AI, called the “discriminator,” tries to tell if what the generator made is real or fake. They keep playing this game, with the generator getting better at making things and the discriminator getting better at spotting fakes. This competition makes the generator improve until it can create things that are so realistic, it’s hard to tell they’re not real. Jason Brownlee, “A Gentle Introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs),” Machine Learning Mastery, June 17, 2019, https://machinelearningmastery.com/what-are-generative-adversarial-networks-gans.
94 Shannon Bond, “AI-Generated Fake Faces Have Become a Hallmark of Online Influence Operations,” NPR, December 15, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143114122/ai-generated-fake-faces-have-become-a-hallmark-of-online-influence-operations; Sophie J. Nightingale and Hany Farid, “AI-Synthesized Faces Are Indistinguishable from Real Faces and More Trustworthy,” PNAS 119, no. 8 (2022): 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120481119.
95 Josh A. Goldstein and Renée DiResta, “Research Note: This Salesperson Does Not Exist: How Tactics from Political Influence Operations on Social Media Are Deployed for Commercial Lead Generation,” HKS Misinformation Review, September 15, 2022, https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/research-note-this-salesperson-does-not-exist-how-tactics-from-political-influence-operations-on-social-media-are-deployed-for-commercial-lead-generation.
96 Shivansh Mundra et al., “New Approaches for Detecting AI-Generated Profile Photos,” LinkedIn Engineering, June 20, 2023, https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2023/new-approaches-for-detecting-ai-generated-profile-photos.
97 Cade Metz, “Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue),” New York Times, November 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/science/artificial-intelligence-ai-gpt3.html.
98 DiResta, Grossman, and Siegel, “In-House vs. Outsourced Trolls.”
99 Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, “Go Ask Alice: The Curious Case of ‘Alice Donovan.’” CounterPunch, December 25, 2017, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/25/go-ask-alice-the-curious-case-of-alice-donovan-2.
100 Kris McGuffie and Alex Newhouse, “The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Advanced Neural Language Models,” Middlebury Institute of International Studies, September 9, 2020, https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/sites/www.middlebury.edu.institute/files/2020-09/gpt3-article.pdf.
101 Josh A. Goldstein et al., “Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations,” arXiv, January 10, 2023, https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04246.
102 Emilio Ferrara, “Social Bot Detection in the Age of ChatGPT: Challenges and Opportunities,” First Monday 28, no. 6 (June 5, 2023), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v28i6.13185; Kai-Cheng Yang and Filippo Menczer, “Anatomy of an AI-Powered Malicious Social Botnet,” arXiv (July 2023): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.16336.
103 Philip Marcelo, “FACT FOCUS: Fake Image of Pentagon Explosion Briefly Sends Jitters Through Stock Market,” AP News, May 23, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-explosion-misinformation-stock-market-ai-96f534c790872fde67012ee81b5ed6a4.
104 Blue checkmarks had once been awarded by Twitter to notable accounts, including news organizations and prominent people who had verified their identity. Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, most legacy accounts lost their checks, and the verification symbol became available to any account willing to pay for an $8/month subscription to Twitter (without any actual verification). There were multiple instances of accounts paying to impersonate others within the first few days of the program.
105 Joseph Menn, “Viral Pentagon Explosion Hoax Took Off from Pro-Russian Accounts,” Washington Post, June 10, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/09/viral-hoax-pentagon-twitter.
106 In 2018, researchers observing the growing sophistication of generative AI capabilities argued that the mere existence of the technology (then still difficult for most people to access) would exacerbate the growing crisis of trust. Creating convincing faked video or audio was not the only potential risk, we argued—rather, the existence of the technology itself could be used to impugn reality. Law professors Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney subsequently termed this the liar’s dividend, describing ways in which a person—particularly a politician—could deny that a real event had happened by claiming that the evidence had actually been generated by AI. See Charlie Warzel, “Believable: The Terrifying Future of Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, February 12, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news; Robert Chesney and Danielle Keats Citron, “Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security,” California Law Review 107, no. 6 (2019): 1753-1820, https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38RV0D15J.
107 Casey Tolan et al., “Slain Hamas Militants’ Body Camera Videos Show the Preparation and Tactics Behind Their Terror Attack on Israel,” CNN, October 26, 2023, https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2023/middleeast/hamas-attack-body-cam-videos-invs-dg.
108 Miles Klee, “Verified Hate Speech Accounts Are Pivoting to Palestine for Clout and Cash,” Rolling Stone, November 1, 2023, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/twitter-hate-speech-accounts-palestine-clout-1234867382.
109 Kevin Liptak, “White House Says Biden’s Remark on Photos of Children Was Intended to ‘Underscore the Utter Depravity’ of Hamas Attack,” CNN, October 12, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/politics/joe-biden-photos-children-hamas-israel/index.html.
110 Alice Speri, “‘Beheaded Babies’ Report Spread Wide and Fast—but Israel Military Won’t Confirm It,” The Intercept, October 11, 2023, https://theintercept.com/2023/10/11/israel-hamas-disinformation.
111 Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson, “A.I. Muddies Israel-Hamas War in Unexpected Way,” New York Times, October 28, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/business/media/ai-muddies-israel-hamas-war-in-unexpected-way.html.
112 Christopher Mims, “Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/deepfake-video-is-anything-still-true-on-the-internet-89843150.
113 Requirements and means of verification vary by country; see “About Ads About Social Issues, Elections or Politics,” Meta Business Help Center, accessed December 19, 2023, https://www.facebook.com/business/help/167836590566506?id=288762101909005.
114 “Inauthentic Behaviour,” Meta Transparency Center, accessed December 19, 2023, https://transparency.fb.com/en-gb/policies/community-standards/inauthentic-behavior.
115 Cory Dunton, “Get Helpful Context with About This Image,” Google Blog, May 10, 2023, https://blog.google/products/search/about-this-image-google-search.
116 Samantha Bradshaw, Renée DiResta, and Christopher Giles, “How Unmoderated Platforms Became the Frontline for Russian Propaganda,” Lawfare, August 17, 2022, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/how-unmoderated-platforms-became-frontline-russian-propaganda-0.
117 Interestingly, as Twitter has undergone a change of ownership and fired most of its integrity teams, it is not pursuing investigations into foreign influence operations as thoroughly as it once did.
118 Three Kid Rock pages on Gettr, Gab, and Truth Social had nearly identical bios and were likely from the same user. Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, “Suspected Russian Actors Leverage Alternative Tech Platforms in Continued Effort to Covertly Influence Right-Wing U.S. Audiences,” Graphika, December 13, 2022; Donald J. Trump (@donaldjtrumpjr), “Yup,” Instagram, June 15, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Ce1j3F2u5nY.
119 Trump, “Yup.”
120 Vittoria Elliott, “Telegram’s Bans on Extremist Channels Aren’t Really Bans,” Wired, November 28, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-hamas-channels-deplatform.
121 Marianna Spring, “Marianna Vyshemirsky: ‘My Picture Was Used to Spread Lies About the War,’” BBC, May 17, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-61412773.
122 Maayan Lubell, “Exclusive: Facebook Removes More Russia Posts Claiming Children’s Hospital Bombing a Hoax,” Reuters, March 16, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-removes-more-russia-posts-claiming-childrens-hospital-bombing-2022-03-16.
123 See, for example, this collaboration between CNN and Clemson University investigating a Russian troll factory in Ghana: Clarissa Ward, “Inside a Russian Troll Factory in Ghana,” CNN, March 12, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/03/12/russian-trolls-ghana-ward-pkg-vpx.cnn.
124 Miles Klee, “Twitter Fires Election Integrity Team Ahead of 2024 Elections,” Rolling Stone, September 27, 2023, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/twitter-elon-musk-fires-safety-team-2024-elections-1234832199.
125 Kate Starbird, Ahmer Arif, and Tom Wilson, “Disinformation as Collaborative Work,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, no. CSCW (November 7, 2019): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1145/3359229.
126 Samantha Bradshaw, Renée DiResta, and Carly Miller, “Playing Both Sides: Russian State-Backed Media Coverage of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” International Journal of Press/Politics, February 28, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221082052.
127 Stanford Internet Observatory Team, “Digital Street Conflict,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, June 3, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/digital-street-conflict.
128 Amanda Seitz, Eric Tucker, and Mike Catalini, “How China’s TikTok, Facebook Influencers Push Propaganda,” AP News, March 30, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/china-tiktok-facebook-influencers-propaganda-81388bca676c560e02a1b493ea9d6760.
129 Vincent Ni, “China Hires Western TikTokers to Polish Its Image During 2022 Winter Olympics,” The Guardian, January 22, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/22/china-hires-western-tiktokers-to-polish-its-image-during-2022-winter-olympics.
130 David Gilbert, “Russian TikTok Influencers Are Being Paid to Spread Kremlin Propaganda,” Vice, March 11, 2022, https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxken/russian-tiktok-influencers-paid-propaganda.
131 See, for example, Henry John Farrell and Bruce Schneier, “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy,” SSRN Electronic Journal, November 17, 2018, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3273111: “Election security does not simply involve physical infrastructure, such as ballots and polling booths. It also involves roughly consensual expectations about how the system works, who won and who lost, and so on. If an attacker does not penetrate the physical election infrastructure, but does successfully subvert the shared expectations around the election, she can nevertheless succeed.”
132 See Yochai Benkler, “The Danger of Overstating the Impact of Information Operations,” Lawfare, October 23, 2020, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/danger-overstating-impact-information-operations: “If the objective of the campaign is to sow doubt and confusion, to make Americans believe that we have been infiltrated and that Russia is an all-powerful actor messing with our democracy, then overstating the importance of the campaign simply reinforces and executes the Russian plan.”
133 Josh A. Goldstein and Renée DiResta, “Foreign Influence Operations and the 2020 Election: Framing the Debate,” Lawfare, October 23, 2020, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/foreign-influence-operations-and-2020-election-framing-debate.
134 The US District Court for the District of Columbia, “Indictment Criminal No. (18 U.S.C. §§ 2,371, 1349, 1028A),” US Department of Justice, February 16, 2018, https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1035562/download.
135 Gregory Eady et al., “Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency Foreign Influence Campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US Election and Its Relationship to Attitudes and Voting Behavior,” Nature Communications 14, no. 62 (2023): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35576-9.
136 Marshall Cohen, “Access Hollywood, Russian Hacking and the Podesta Emails: One Year Later,” CNN, October 7, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/07/politics/one-year-access-hollywood-russia-podesta-email/index.html.
137 “Launching the SIO Virality Project,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, May 21, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/launching-sio-virality-project.
138 “Iran Leader Refuses US Help; Cites Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory,” Al Jazeera, March 23, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/3/23/iran-leader-refuses-us-help-cites-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory.
139 Shelby Grossman, “Virality Project: Saudi Arabia State Media and COVID-19,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, June 24, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/saudi-arabia-state-media-and-covid-19.
140 Maggie Michael, “Yemen’s Rebels Crack Down as COVID-19 and Rumors Spread,” AP News, June 9, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-health-yemen-ap-top-news-virus-outbreak-677a1fc12d864cd37eea57e5f71614a2.
141 Daniel Bush, “Virality Project (Russia): Penguins and Protests,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, June 9, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/penguins-and-protests-rt-and-coronavirus-pandemic.
142 DiResta et al., “Telling China’s Story.”
143 John Dotson, “The CCP’s New Leading Small Group for Countering the Coronavirus Epidemic—and the Mysterious Absence of Xi Jinping,” Jamestown Foundation, February 5, 2020, https://jamestown.org/program/the-ccps-new-leading-small-group-for-countering-the-coronavirus-epidemic-and-the-mysterious-absence-of-xi-jinping.
144 Vanessa Molter and Renée DiResta, “Pandemics & Propaganda: How Chinese State Media Creates and Propagates CCP Coronavirus Narratives,” Misinformation Review, June 8, 2020, https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/pandemics-propaganda-how-chinese-state-media-creates-and-propagates-ccp-coronavirus-narratives.
145 Paul Mozur et al., “China Uses YouTube Influencers to Spread Propaganda,” New York Times, December 31, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/13/technology/china-propaganda-youtube-influencers.html.
146 Renée DiResta, “For China, the ‘USA Virus’ Is a Geopolitical Ploy,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/chinas-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/609772.
147 Lijian Zhao (@zlj517), “CDC was caught on the spot,” Twitter, March 12, 2020, 10:37 a.m., https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823.
148 DiResta, “For China, the ‘USA Virus’ Is a Geopolitical Ploy.”
149 Bret Schafer and Raymond Serrato, “Reply All: Inauthenticity and Coordinated Replying in Pro-Chinese Communist Party Twitter Networks,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, August 6, 2020, https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/reply-all-inauthenticity-and-coordinated-replying-in-pro-chinese-communist-party-twitter-networks; Brandy and Schafer, “How China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomats Use and Abuse Twitter.”
150 Renée DiResta et al., “Sockpuppets Spin COVID Yarns: An Analysis of PRC-Attributed June 2020 Twitter Takedown,” Stanford Internet Observatory, June 11, 2020, https://fsi.stanford.edu/publication/june-2020-prc-takedown.
151 Josh Lederman, “U.S. Insisting That the U.N. Call Out Chinese Origins of Coronavirus,” NBC News, March 25, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-insisting-u-n-call-out-chinese-origins-coronavirus-n1169111.
152 Nathaniel Gleicher, “Labeling State-Controlled Media on Facebook,” Meta, June 4, 2020, https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/labeling-state-controlled-media; “New Labels for Government and State-Affiliated Media Accounts,” Twitter, August 6, 2020, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/new-labels-for-government-and-state-affiliated-media-accounts.
CHAPTER 7: VIRUSES, VACCINES, AND VIRALITY
1 Jennifer Kasten, “What Judy Mikovits Gets Wrong,” Medpage Today, May 12, 2020, https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/generalinfectiousdisease/86461.
2 Sheera Frenkel, Ben Decker, and Davey Alba, “How the ‘Plandemic’ Movie and Its Falsehoods Spread Widely Online,” New York Times, May 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/technology/plandemic-movie-youtube-facebook-coronavirus.html.
3 Angelo Fichera et al., “The Falsehoods of the ‘Plandemic’ Video,” FactCheck.org, May 8, 2020, https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/the-falsehoods-of-the-plandemic-video.
4 See Jon Cohen, “Controversial CFS Researcher Arrested and Jailed,” Science, November 19, 2011, https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-cfs-researcher-arrested-and-jailed. Charges were later dropped.
5 Jon Cohen, “In a Rare Move, Science Without Authors’ Consent Retracts Paper That Tied Mouse Virus to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,” Science, December 22, 2011, https://www.science.org/content/article/updated-rare-move-science-without-authors-consent-retracts-paper-tied-mouse-virus.
6 Stuart J. D. Neil and Edward M Campbell, “Fake Science: XMRV, COVID-19, and the Toxic Legacy of Dr. Judy Mikovits,” AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses 36, no. 7 (July 2020): 545–549.
7 Martin Enserink and Jon Cohen, “Fact-Checking Judy Mikovits, the Controversial Virologist Attacking Anthony Fauci in a Viral Conspiracy Video,” Science, May 8, 2020, https://www.science.org/content/article/fact-checking-judy-mikovits-controversial-virologist-attacking-anthony-fauci-viral.
8 Josh Rottenberg and Stacy Perman, “Meet the Ojai Dad Who Made the Most Notorious Piece of Coronavirus Disinformation Yet,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020-05-13/plandemic-coronavirus-documentary-director-mikki-willis-mikovits.
9 “Infodemic,” WHO, https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic.
10 “Launching the Virality Project,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/content/virality-project.
11 Katherine Schaeffer, “Nearly Three-in-Ten Americans Believe COVID-19 Was Made in a Lab,” Pew Research, April 8, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/08/nearly-three-in-ten-americans-believe-covid-19-was-made-in-a-lab; Aaron Blake, “How the Covid Lab Leak Became the American Public’s Predominant Theory,” Washington Post, March 16, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/16/lab-leak-theory-polling.
12 Blake, “How the Covid Lab Leak Became the American Public’s Predominant Theory.”
13 Leana S. Wen, “How to Investigate the Lab-Leak Theory Without Inflaming Anti-Asian Hate,” Washington Post, June 1, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/01/we-need-investigate-lab-leak-theory-without-inflaming-anti-asian-hate.
14 Meta’s moderation policy on the lab leak hypothesis shifted over time. The date of the origin of the policy is elusive, but by May 2021, they had begun to step back from moderating origin claims. See Elizabeth Culliford, “Facebook No Longer Banning Posts Calling the Coronavirus ‘Man-Made,” Reuters, May 27, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/facebook-no-longer-banning-posts-calling-coronavirus-man-made-2021-05-27.
15 Early in the pandemic, as there was significant concern about transmission even outdoors, authorities made decisions about what could stay open and what had to close, about the kinds of gatherings that were approved and the kinds that were not. While some of these choices could be explained by public health officials simply not knowing where the lines should have been at that point, there was also what could be read as ideological bias to some of the policies (attending outdoor mass protests related to racism in the summer of 2020 was declared reasonable even as attending outdoor church services was banned in many locales). This seeming hypocrisy was quickly seized upon by partisan influencers and media, who saw an opportunity to reinforce ideological divides around “woke” capture of public health officials and institutions who were more concerned about looking antiracist or not offending China than undertaking a clear-eyed assessment of the facts and risks.
16 Roxanne Khamsi, “Coronavirus Is Bad. Comparing It to the Flu Is Worse,” Wired, February 8, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-is-bad-comparing-it-to-the-flu-is-worse.
17 Avery Hartmans, “Silicon Valley VC Firm Andreessen Horowitz Is Asking Visitors to Avoid Handshakes Due to the Coronavirus Outbreak,” Business Insider, February 7, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/andreessen-horowitz-coronavirus-fears-handshake-ban-2020-2.
18 Balaji (@balajis), “The Wuhan mayor is being pressed to resign after approving a group dinner with 40,000 people, knowing that a deadly virus was on the loose…,” Twitter, February 6, 2020, https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1225178842580619265.
19 See, for example, the March update note on this BuzzFeed article: Dan Vergano, “Here’s What We Do and Don’t Know About the Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak,” BuzzFeed News, January 28, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/coronavirus-cases-deaths-flu.
20 Balaji (@balajis), “Don’t let these wokes rewrite history,” X, April 25, 2021, 9:48 p.m., https://x.com/balajis/status/1386391617167183872.
21 T. A. Frank, “‘The Coronavirus Crisis Was Built for Insurgent Information’: Why Some Early MAGA Adopters Went Against Trump’s Virus Doctrine,” Vanity Fair, March 23, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-adopters-went-against-trumps-virus-doctrine.
22 Zeynep Tufekci, “Why Telling People They Don’t Need to Mask Backfired,” New York Times, March 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html.
23 Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad, “The Noble Lies of COVID-19,” Slate, July 28, 2021, https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html.
24 Lucy Tompkins et al., “Entering Uncharted Territory, the U.S. Counts 500,000 Covid-Related Deaths,” New York Times, February 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/us/us-covid-deaths-half-a-million.html.
25 Renée DiResta and Isabella Garcia-Camargo, “Virality Project (US): Marketing Meets Misinformation,” Stanford Internet Observatory, Freeman University Spogli Institute for International Studies, May 26, 2020, https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/manufacturing-influence-0.
26 Andrei Makhovsky, “Nobody Will Die From Coronavirus in Belarus, Says President,” Reuters, April 13, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-belarus/nobody-will-die-from-coronavirus-in-belarus-says-president-idUSKCN21V1PK.
27 Jason Burke, “Tanzania’s Covid-Denying President, John Magufuli, Dies Aged 61,” The Guardian, March 18, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/17/tanzanias-president-john-magufuli-dies-aged-61.
28 Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 29–30.
29 Hugo Mercier, Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 222.
30 Brian Kennedy, Alec Tyson, and Cary Funk, “Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Other Groups Declines,” Pew Research Center, February 15, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/15/americans-trust-in-scientists-other-groups-declines.
31 Daniel A. Cox et al., “America’s Crisis of Confidence: Rising Mistrust, Conspiracies, and Vaccine Hesitancy After COVID-19: Findings from the May 2023 American Perspectives Survey,” American Survey Center, September 28, 2023, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research /americas-crisis-of-confidence-rising-mistrust-conspiracies-and-vaccine-hesitancy-after-covid-19.
32 Ashley Kirzinger et al., “The COVID-19 Pandemic: Insights from Three Years of KFF Polling,” KFF, March 7, 2023, https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/the-covid-19-pandemic-insights-from-three-years-of-kff-polling.
33 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer [Research Report] (Edelman Trust Institute, 2022), https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2022-01/Trust%2022_Top10.pdf.
34 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Report [Research Report] (Edelman Trust Institute, 2022), https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2022-01/2022%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20FINAL_Jan25.pdf.
35 “2023 Edelman Trust Barometer: Navigating a Polarized World,” Edelman, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2023/trust-barometer.
36 Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369.
37 Tim Miller, “President Candace,” The Bulwark, July 18, 2023, https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/president-candace-owens.
38 Mercier, Not Born Yesterday, 225–247.
39 Rottenberg and Perman, “Meet the Ojai Dad.”
40 This is where Willis’s editing skills are most apparent; Mikovits had done dozens of interviews with conspiracy theorist YouTube channels in the weeks leading up to Plandemic. They got some attention within the communities but were not breakout successes because she often rambled and relied on scientific jargon. Plandemic, by contrast, skillfully worked around the speaker’s tendency toward convoluted explanations.
41 “#1263—Renée DiResta,” The Joe Rogan Experience, Spotify, March 2019, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VX7FJGIYr1eKSEagOeb22.
42 Todd Spangler, “Joe Rogan Tries to Clarify Controversial Comments About COVID Vaccines,” Reuters, April 30, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/variety/joe-rogan-tries-to-clarify-controversial-comments-about-covid-vaccines-idINL4N2MM5PH.
43 E. J. Dickson, “How Joe Rogan Became a Cheerleader for Ivermectin,” Rolling Stone, September 2, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/joe-rogan-covid19-misinformation-ivermectin-spotify-podcast-1219976.
44 Diane Mapes, “Spinning Science: Overhyped Headlines, Snarled Statistics Lead Readers Astray,” Fred Hutch Cancer Center, Hutch News Stories, February 13, 2020, https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/02/spinning-science-overhyped-headlines-snarled-statistics-lead-readers-astray.html.
45 Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 106–107.
46 Sheera Frenkel, “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online,” New York Times, July 24, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/technology/joseph-mercola-coronavirus-misinformation-online.html.
47 Jon D. Lee, An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease (Boulder: University Press of Colorado and Utah State University Press, 2014), 59.
48 Tara Haelle, “This Is the Moment the Anti-vaccine Movement Has Been Waiting For,” New York Times, August 31, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opinion/anti-vaccine-movement.html.
49 Renée DiResta, “Anti-vaxxers Think This Is Their Moment,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/campaign-against-vaccines-already-under-way/617443.
50 Brandy Zadrozny, “Parents Are Poisoning Their Children with Bleach to ‘Cure’ Autism. These Moms Are Trying to Stop It,” NBC News, May 21, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/moms-go-undercover-fight-fake-autism-cures-private-facebook-groups-n1007871.
51 Renée DiResta and Claire Wardle, “Online Misinformation About Vaccines” (paper contributed to “Meeting the Challenge of Vaccination Hesitancy,” Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Science & Policy Group, May 2020, https://www.sabin.org/app/uploads/2022/04/Sabin-Aspen-report-2020_Meeting-the-Challenge-of-Vaccine-Hesitancy.pdf).
52 Julia Carrie Wong, “How Facebook and YouTube Help Spread Anti-vaxxer Propaganda,” The Guardian, February 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/feb/01/facebook-youtube-anti-vaccination-misinformation-social-media; Jessica Glenza, “Majority of Anti-vaxx Ads on Facebook Are Funded by Just Two Organizations,” The Guardian, November 14, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/13/majority-antivaxx-vaccine-ads-facebook-funded-by-two-organizations-study.
53 WHO, Measles Outbreak in the Pacific—Situation Report No. 9: Joint WHO/UNICEF Measles Outbreak Response and Preparedness in the Pacific, World Health Organization, 2019, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/wpro---documents/dps/outbreaks-and-emergencies/measles-2019/measles-pacific-who-unicef-sitrep-20200103.pdf.
54 Erin Schumaker, “Low Vaccination Rate and Deadly Medical Mistake Led to Samoa Measles Outbreak: Health Experts,” ABC News, November 27, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/low-vaccination-rate-deadly-medical-mistake-led-samoa/story?id=67317110.
55 Renée DiResta, On Virality: How the Anti-vaccine Movement Influences Public Discourse Through Online Activism (The Lancet and Financial Times Commission Report), July 15, 2020, https://www.governinghealthfutures2030.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/072020_Renee-DiResta_On-virality-How-the-antivaccine-movement-influences-public-discourse-through-online-activism.pdf.
56 The outbreak in Brooklyn began in September 2018 and lasted through July 2019. See Jane R. Zucker et al., “Consequences of Undervaccination—Measles Outbreak, New York City, 2018–2019,” New England Journal of Medicine 382, no. 11 (March 2020): 1009–1017, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1912514.
57 “Combatting Vaccine Misinformation,” Meta Newsroom, Meta, March 7, 2019, https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/combatting-vaccine-misinformation.
58 Erin Schumaker, “Anti-vaccine Leaders Targeting Minority Becomes Growing Concern at NYC Forum,” ABC News, November 10, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/rfk-jrs-york-city-vaccine-forum-highlights-concerns/story?id=66158336.
59 DiResta and Garcia-Camargo, “Virality Project (US).”
60 Renée Diresta and Gilad Lotan, “Anti-vaxxers Are Using Twitter to Manipulate a Vaccine Bill,” Wired, June 8, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/06/antivaxxers-influencing-legislation.
61 The Virality Project, “Memes, Magnets and Microchips: Narrative Dynamics Around COVID-19 Vaccines,” Stanford Digital Repository, February 24, 2022, https://doi.org/10.25740 /mx395xj8490.
62 There is a case study of our joint effort here: Hussain S. Lalani et al., “Addressing Viral Medical Rumors and False or Misleading Information,” Annals of Internal Medicine, August 2023, https://doi.org/10.7326/M23-1218.
63 Anna Kata, “Anti-vaccine Activists, Web 2.0, and the Postmodern Paradigm—an Overview of Tactics and Tropes Used Online by the Anti-vaccination Movement,” PubMed, December 13, 2011, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22172504.
64 William Rowley, Cow-Pox Inoculation: No Security Against Small-Pox Infection (London: J. Barfield, 1805), 11.
65 Richard B. Gibbs, letter reproduced in Human Nature: A Monthly Journal of Zoistic Science, June 1867, 176, in archive of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/human_nature/human_nature_v1_n3_june_1867.pdf. Although this letter comes from Richard B. Gibbs, the detail about the syphilitic family is something that Gibbs quotes from a “Dr. Smedley, of Matlock Bank Hydropathic Establishment.”
66 Francis T. Bond, “The Vaccination Problem,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 1929 (1897): 1828.
67 Tara C. Smith, “Vaccine Rejection and Hesitancy: A Review and Call to Action,” PubMed, July 18, 2017, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28948177.
68 Micah Lee, “Network of Right-Wing Health Care Providers Is Making Millions Off Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, Hacked Data Reveals,” The Intercept, September 28, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/covid-telehealth-hydroxychloroquine-ivermectin-hacked/.
69 Richard M. Carpiano et al., “Confronting the Evolution and Expansion of Anti-vaccine Activism in the USA in the COVID-19 Era,” Lancet 401 (2023): 967–970.
70 Renée DiResta, “The Anti-vaccine Influencers Who Are Merely Asking Questions,” The Atlantic, April 24, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/influencers-who-keep-stoking-fears-about-vaccines/618687.
71 Nicki Minaj (@NICKIMINAJ), “My cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent…,” Twitter, September 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/NICKIMINAJ/status/1437532566945341441.
72 Grant Rindner, “Nicki Minaj’s Cousin’s Friend’s Balls, Explained,” GQ Magazine, September 16, 2021, https://www.gq.com/story/nicki-minaj-vaccine-twitter-met-gala-2021.
73 Robyn Dixon, “Want to Skip the Vaccine in Russia? You Could be Suspended from Work,” Washington Post, July 28, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-vaccine-rules-putin/2021/07/27/640ea8b6-ebff-11eb-a2ba-3be31d349258_story.html; Daria Litvinova, “Russia Mandates Vaccinations for Some as Virus Cases Surge,” AP News, June 25, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-health-coronavirus-pandemic-business-42d0c14f0545371e16a360b677cb4c38.
74 Michael R. Gordon and Dustin Volz, “Russian Disinformation Campaign Aims to Undermine Confidence in Pfizer, Other Covid-19 Vaccines, U.S. Officials Say,” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-campaign-aims-to-undermine-confidence-in-pfizer-other-covid-19-vaccines-u-s-officials-say-11615129200.
75 Reuters Fact Check, “Fact Check—Chimpanzee Adenovirus Vector in the AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine Does Not Cause Monkeypox,” Reuters, May 24, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-health-monkeypox/fact-check-chimpanzee-adenovirus-vector-in-the-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-does-not-cause-monkeypox-idUSL2N2XG0W1.
76 Manveen Rana and Sean O’Neill, “Russians Spread Fake News over Oxford Coronavirus Vaccine,” The Times, October 16, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20201021023753/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russians-spread-fake-news-over-oxford-coronavirus-vaccine-2nzpk8vrq.
77 Charlie Haynes and Flora Carmichael, “The YouTubers Who Blew the Whistle on an Anti-vax Plot,” BBC News, July 25, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-57928647.
78 “July 2021 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report,” Meta, August 10, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/july-2021-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior-report.
79 Adam Satariano and Davey Alba, “Burning Cell Towers, out of Baseless Fear They Spread the Virus,” New York Times, April 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/technology/coronavirus-5g-uk.html.
80 Kelvin Chan, Beatrice Dupuy, and Arijeta Lajka, “Conspiracy Theorists Burn 5G Towers Claiming Link to Virus,” AP News, April 21, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/health-ap-top-news-wireless-technology-international-news-virus-outbreak-4ac3679b6f39e8bd2561c1c8eeafd855.
81 Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023), 177.
82 Camille Caldera, “Fact Check: Nurse Who Fainted After COVID-19 Vaccination Is Alive and Well,” USA Today, December 23, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/23/fact-check-nurse-who-fainted-after-being-vaccinated-alive/4024424001.
83 Brandy Zadrozny, “Conspiracy Theorists Made Tiffany Dover into an Anti-vaccine Icon. She’s Finally Ready to Talk About It,” NBC News, April 10, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/tiffany-dover-conspiracy-theorists-silence-rcna69401.
84 The Virality Project, “Memes, Magnets and Microchips,” 50–52.
85 “Table 4. CICP Claims Compensated (Fiscal Years 2010–2023),” US Health Resources and Services Administration, Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data/table-4.
86 “The Joe Rogan & Dr. Peter Mccullough Interview,” ZDOGGMD, December 17, 2021, https://zdoggmd.com/peter-mccullough.
87 “Joe Rogan Interview with Peter McCullough Contains Multiple False and Unsubstantiated Claims About the COVID-19 Pandemic and Vaccines,” Health Feedback, https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/joe-rogan-interview-with-peter-mccullough-contains-multiple-false-and-unsubstantiated-claims-about-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-vaccines.
88 Bruce Y. Lee, “Have More Athletes Died Suddenly Since Covid-19 Vaccines Arrived? Such Claims Lack Evidence,” Forbes, January 14, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2023/01/14/no-evidence-of-more-athletes-having-died-suddenly-despite-covid-19-vaccine-claims/?sh=22d1dc2875c2.
89 Ali Swenson and Angelo Fichera, “‘Died Suddenly’ Posts Twist Tragedies to Push Vaccine Lies,” AP News, February 4, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/vaccine-died-suddenly-misinformation-a8e3a80a015ba9bf78b6bd4f3c271f58.
90 Angelo Fichera, “Claims Baselessly Link COVID Vaccines to Athlete Deaths,” AP News, January 9, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-covid-vaccines-athlete-deaths-1500-989195 878254.
91 Ibid.
92 “Crazy, Disturbing Damar Hamlin Conspiracy Theory Emerges,” NBC Sports, January 25, 2023, https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/news/crazy-disturbing-damar-hamlin-conspiracy-theory-emerges.
93 McCullough was suspended from Twitter in July 2021 on his account @cov19treatments. While he was able to start another account (@p_mcculloughmd) in November of that year, he was upset that Twitter would not give it Verified status. He, along with several other physicians suspended for COVID-19 misinformation, sued Twitter in June 2022, claiming that Twitter violated its Covid-19 misinformation guidelines by suspending the doctors’ accounts because “none of these physicians posted false or misleading information, nor did they receive five strikes before suspension.” The lawsuit was tossed out on Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) grounds, with the court reaffirming Twitter’s right to carry the content it saw fit. See Robert W. Malone, MD et al. v. Twitter Inc. et al., CGC-22-600397 (Cal. Super. Ct. Jun. 27, 2022), https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/Malone-et-al-vs-Twitter-rtn-87.pdf.
94 “Re: Notice of Recommended Disciplinary Sanction,” addressed to Dr. McCullough, from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), signed by Furman S. McDonald, chair of Credentials and Certification Committee, ABIM ID: 136084, October 18, 2022, accessed on DocumentCloud database, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23242430-abim-decision-on-mccullough.
95 Horwitz, Broken Code, 178–179.
96 Klein, Doppelganger, 110.
97 Derek Thompson, “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man,” The Atlantic, April 1, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475.
98 “Leaderboard: Top Politics publications,” Substack, https://substack.com/leaderboard/politics.
99 Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski, and Joseph Menn, “Misinformation Research Is Buckling Under GOP Legal Attacks,” Washington Post, September 23, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/23/online-misinformation-jim-jordan.
100 Charles Silver and David A. Hyman, “COVID-19: A Case Study of Government Failure,” Pandemics and Policy Series, Cato Institute, September 15, 2020, https://www.cato.org/pandemics-policy/covid-19-case-study-government-failure.
101 Eric Reinhart, “Why U.S. Pandemic Management Has Failed: Lack of Attention to America’s Epidemic Engines,” STAT, October 5, 2021, https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/05/jails-prisons-schools-nursing-homes-america-epidemic-engines; Eric Lipton et al., “The C.D.C. Waited ‘Its Entire Existence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong?,” New York Times, June 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/cdc-coronavirus.html; Derek Thompson, “Why America’s Institutions Are Failing,” The Atlantic, June 16, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/why-americas-institutions-are-failing/613078; Erika Edwards, “How the CDC’s Communication Failures During Covid Tarnished the Agency,” NBC News, October 1, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdcs-communication-failures-covid-tarnished-agency-rcna46425; “First Lessons from Government Evaluations of COVID-19 Responses: A Synthesis,” OECD, January 21, 2022, https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/first-lessons-from-government-evaluations-of-covid-19-responses-a-synthesis-483507d6; Eleanor Schiff and Daniel J. Mallinson, “Trumping the Centers for Disease Control: A Case Comparison of the CDC’s Response to COVID-19, H1N1, and Ebola,” Administration & Society 55, no. 1 (2023): 158–183, https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221112308; Sudip Parikh, “Why We Must Rebuild Trust in Science,” Pew, February 9, 2021, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/winter-2021/why-we-must-rebuild-trust-in-science.
102 Catalina Jaramillo, “It’s Not News, nor ‘Scandalous,’ That Pfizer Trial Didn’t Test Transmission,” FactCheck.org, October 18, 2022, https://www.factcheck.org/2022/10/scicheck-its-not-news-nor-scandalous-that-pfizer-trial-didnt-test-transmission.
103 Reuters Fact Check, “Preventing Transmission Never Required for COVID Vaccines’ Initial Approval; Pfizer Vax Did Reduce Transmission of Early Variants,” Reuters, October 14, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-transmission/fact-check-preventing-transmission-never-required-for-covid-vaccines-initial-approval-pfizer-vax-did-reduce-transmission-of-early-variants-idUSL1N31F20E.
104 Susanna Naggie et al., “Effect of Ivermectin vs Placebo on Time to Sustained Recovery in Outpatients with Mild to Moderate COVID-19: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” JAMA 328, no. 16 (2022): 1595–1603, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2797483; Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo and Preeti N. Malani, “At a Higher Dose and Longer Duration, Ivermectin Still Not Effective Against COVID-19,” JAMA 329, no. 11 (2023): 897–898, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2801828; Maria Popp et al., “Ivermectin for Preventing and Treating COVID‐19,” Cochrane Library, July 28, 2021, https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD015017.pub2/full.
105 “Claim by Steve Kirsch That the Amish Don’t Experience Autism, Cancer, or High COVID-19 Mortality Because They Don’t Vaccinate Is Baseless,” Health Feedback, https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/claim-steve-kirsch-amish-dont-experience-autism-cancer-high-covid-19-mortality-because-they-dont-vaccinate-baseless.
106 “Twitter Files,” Wikipedia, last modified November 15, 2023, http://en.wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files.
107 Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi), “This is a devastating email. Here is Stanford’s Virality project—which partners with multiple state agencies—recommending against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and…,” Twitter, March 10, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230310151556/https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1633955467968802816.
108 Mikki Willis, “Is Your Immune System at the Mercy of… Whatever’s Next?,” Plandemic Series, https://plandemicseries.com/Fierce-Immunity.
109 Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 15.
110 Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 234.
111 Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Benjamin Mueller, “Lab Leak or Not? How Politics Shaped the Battle over Covid’s Origin,” New York Times, March 19, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/politics/covid-origins-lab-leak-politics.html.
112 Neil Jay Sehgal et al., “The Association Between COVID-19 Mortality and the County-Level Partisan Divide in the United States,” HealthAffairs 41, no. 6 (June 2022), https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00085; David Ovalle, “Vaccine Politics May Be to Blame for GOP Excess Deaths, Study Finds,” Washington Post, July 24, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/07/24/covid-vaccines-republicans-deaths.
113 Klein, Doppelganger,101.
114 Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “The Anti-vaccine Movement’s New Frontier,” New York Times, May 25, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/magazine/anti-vaccine-movement.html.
115 Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-pandemic World (London: Verso, 2021), 11.
CHAPTER 8: THE FANTASY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
1 Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber), “It’s true. When I ran cyber at State, we leaned heavily on SpaceX for all things satellite-related. Always had a seat at the table,” Twitter, July 29, 2023, 9:33 p.m., https://web.archive.org/web/20230907145812/https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1685403088075853824.
2 Benz describes himself in myriad ways depending on the interview. His official State Department employment page indicates a November 2020 appointment (see “Michael A. Benz,” US Department of State, November 24, 2020, https://2017-2021.state.gov/biographies/michael-a-benz), and his prior stint as a speechwriter for Secretary Carson is confirmed at “Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (HUD) Employee Salaries 2019,” OpenPayrolls, accessed September 25, 2023, https://openpayrolls.com/federal/united-states-department-of-housing-and-urban-development/2019-assistant-secretary-for-public-affairs. In other biographies he has been identified as a diplomat (see “Mike Benz,” Townhall, n.d., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org /web/20220530091853/https://townhall.com/columnists/mikebenz). In one interview, he puts the dates of his employment as “Fall 2020 to January 2021” and alludes to speechwriting for President Trump as well (see Abhinandan Mishra, “Anti-India Cabal in US State Department Manipulated Online Discourse on PM Modi: Ex US Diplomat,” Sunday Guardian (India), updated February 5, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230206060214/https://sundayguardianlive.com/news/anti-india-cabal-us-state-department-manipulated-online-discourse-pm-modi). In another interview, he laid out his responsibilities for his few months at the State Department: “I was the deputy assistant secretary for International Communications and Information Technology, which is a long way of saying I ran the big tech portfolio for the State Department in the Economic Bureau. I had three divisions under me. One was on security defending IT as it relates to low earth satellites and SpaceX and subsea cables and fiber optics. Another was our U.S. tech policy vis-a-vis countries on a one-off basis. The third division was multilateral affairs, which is basically the private sector” (see “Unraveling the Web of Internet Freedom: A Candid Conversation with Mike Benz, Former Diplomat Turned Digital Freedom Advocate,” Federal Newswire, April 23, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230419170152/https://thefederalnewswire.com/stories/641707686-weekend-interview-mike-benz).
3 See Mike Benz, “Department of Homeland Censorship’: How DHS Seized Power over Online Speech,” August 27, 2022, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230517184202/https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/department-of-homeland-censorship-how-dhs-seized-power-over-online-speech; additionally articulated on Twitter in many threads, e.g., Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber), “Chris Krebs, the DHS director at CISA who deputized EIP and Atlantic Council to censor 22 million tweets during the 2020 election cycle, even gave the opening remarks at the Atlantic Council tell-all about how they colluded to silence conservatives,” Twitter, December 23, 2022, 5:35 p.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230906174807/https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1606342725975961600.
4 Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graphika, and Stanford Internet Observatory, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository: Election Integrity Partnership, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu/tr171zs0069.
5 Mishra, “Anti-India Cabal in US State Department Manipulated Online Discourse.”
6 Benz uses this metaphor repeatedly to capture attention from credulous audiences on Twitter (see Mike Benz [@MikeBenzCyber], “Would love to explain the AI censorship death star superweapon to @joerogan,” Twitter, July 1, 2023, 8:35 p.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230906192037/https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1675347554895302657), often with accompanying footage of himself discussing the concept. For a summary of one such video, see Melissa Fine, “Elon Musk ‘Picked a Fight with America’ Say Critics, ‘He Has No Idea the DARPA Rattlesnake He Just Stepped On,’” BizPac Review, July 3, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230711021158/https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/07/03/elon-musk-picked-a-fight-with-america-say-critics-he-has-no-idea-the-darpa-rattlesnake-he-just-stepped-on-1373855.
7 Stanford’s portion of this $3 million award was $748,437 over five years. For details, see “$2.25 Million in National Science Foundation Funding Will Support Center for an Informed Public’s Rapid-Response Research of Mis-and Disinformation,” University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, August 15, 2021, https://www.cip.uw.edu/2021/08/15/national-science-foundation-uw-cip-misinformation-rapid-response-research.
8 The project was first announced at Jason Foster, “My New Project: Empower Oversight: Because That’s What Whistleblowers Do,” Stubborn Things, July 2, 2021, https://jasonfoster.substack.com/p/my-new-project. In 2022, Mike Benz’s Foundation for Freedom Online website acknowledged Empower Oversight in its footer; see “Protecting Digital Liberties, Educating about Censorship, Promoting Online Freedom,” Foundation for Freedom Online, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20220829203730/https://www.foundationforfreedom online.com.
9 Robert Faturechi, “A Partisan Combatant, a Remorseful Blogger: The Senate Staffer Behind the Attack on the Trump-Russia Investigation,” ProPublica, March 28, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/jason-foster-the-senate-staffer-behind-the-attack-on-the-trump-russia-investigation.
10 “Mission,” Empower Oversight Whistleblowers & Research, accessed September 23, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230809021038/https://empowr.us/mission.
11 “Disinfo Dictionary: Benz, Mike,” Tablet, March 27, 2023, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/disinformation-dictionary#benz.
12 Greg Piper, “Stanford Accused of Rebooting CIA Mind-Control Project with ‘News Source Trustworthiness Ratings,’” Just the News, updated August 25, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230825102917/https://justthenews.com/accountability/watchdogs/stanford-accused-rebooting-cia-mind-control-project-news-source.
13 Jeff Cercone, “Partnership Targeted Election Misinformation, Not Conservatives,” PolitiFact, October 11, 2022, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/oct/11/instagram-posts/partnership-targeted-election-misinformation-not-c.
14 Benz, “Department of Homeland Censorship.’”
15 See Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). A liar attempts to conceal their deception; a bullshitter simply does not care about the truth.
16 There is an online adage known as Brandolini’s law, or the bullshit asymmetry principle: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” See Alberto Brandolini (@ziobrando), “The bullshit asimmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it,” Twitter, January 10, 2013, 11:29 p.m., https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521.
17 “A Statement from the Election Integrity Partnership,” Election Integrity Partnership, October 5, 2022, https://www.eipartnership.net/blog/a-statement-from-the-election-integrity-partnership.
18 John Suler, “The Online Disinhibition Effect,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 7, no. 3 (2004): 321–326, https://doi.org/10.1089/1094931041291295.
19 Jeremy Frimer et al., “Incivility Is Rising Among American Politicians on Twitter,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 14, no. 2 (March 2023): 259–269, https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221083811.
20 Sandra González-Bailón and Yphtach Lelkes, “Do Social Media Undermine Social Cohesion? A Critical Review,” Social Issues and Policy Review 17, no. 1 (January 2023): 155–180, https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12091.
21 Brandy Zadrozny, “House GOP Candidate Known for QAnon Support Was ‘Correspondent’ for Conspiracy Website,” NBC News, April 14, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/georgia-congressional-candidate-s-writings-highlight-qanon-support-n1236724.
22 Paul LeBlanc, “Video Surfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene Confronting Parkland Shooting Survivor with Baseless Claims,” CNN, updated January 28, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-david-hogg-video/index.html.
23 Steven W. Webster, Adam N. Glynn, and Matthew P. Motta, “Partisan Schadenfreude and Candidate Cruelty,” Political Psychology, August 23, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12922.
24 Yoel Roth, “Trump Attacked Me. Then Musk Did. It Wasn’t an Accident,” New York Times, September 18, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opinion/trump-elon-musk-twitter.html.
25 Sara Dorn, “Marjorie Taylor Greene Assails Ex-Twitter Execs for Banning Her Account—Accuses One of Endorsing Child Sexualization,” Forbes, February 8, 2023, https://www.forbes.com /sites/saradorn/2023/02/08/marjorie-taylor-greene-assails-ex-twitter-execs-for-banning-her-account-accuses-yoel-roth-of-endorsing-child-sexualization/?sh=47cdc9153848.
26 Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conpiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 56.
27 Adrian Blanco and Amy Gardner, “Where Republican Election Deniers Are on the Ballot Near You,” Washington Post, updated November 8, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2022/election-deniers-running-for-office-elections-2022.
28 Karen Yourish, Larry Buchanan, and Denise Lu, “The 147 Republicans Who Voted to Overturn Election Results,” New York Times, updated January 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/07/us/elections/electoral-college-biden-objectors.html.
29 Greta Bedekovics and Ashleigh Maciolek, “Election Deniers Lost Key Races for Federal and State Offices in the 2022 Midterm Elections,” Center for American Progress, November 22, 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/election-deniers-lost-key-races-for-federal-and-state-offices-in-the-2022-midterm-elections.
30 Elizabeth Dwoskin and Jeremy B. Merrill, “Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Fueled a New Generation of Social Media Influencers,” Washington Post, September 20, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/20/social-media-influencers-election-fraud.
31 Elizabeth Dwoskin (@lizzadwoskin), “NEW: Been working for months on this data project w/@jeremybmerrill. The ‘big lie’ wasn’t just a plan to overturn the election. It was massive clout-building exercise that spawned a generation of influencers,” Twitter, September 20, 2022, 7:20 a.m., https://twitter.com/lizzadwoskin/status/1572229291496308737?s=20.
32 Jesse Singal, “Teen Fiction Twitter Is Eating Its Young,” Reason, June 2019, https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating-its-young; Katy Waldman, “In Y.A., Where Is the Line Between Criticism and Cancel Culture?,” New Yorker, March 21, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-the-line-between-criticism-and-cancel-culture.
33 Nick Popli, “How M&M’s Became the Latest Flash Point in the Culture Wars,” Time, January 23, 2023, https://time.com/6249551/m-m-candy-mascots-culture-wars.
34 Tyler Kingkade et al., “How an Urban Myth About Litter Boxes in Schools Became a GOP Talking Point,” NBC News, October 14, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/urban-myth-litter-boxes-schools-became-gop-talking-point-rcna51439.
35 Many, many things attributed to Mark Twain on the internet were not actually said by Mark Twain.
36 Venkatesh Rao, “The Internet of Beefs,” Ribbonfarm, January 16, 2020, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs.
37 Petter Törnberg, “How Digital Media Drive Affective Polarization Through Partisan Sorting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 42 (October 2022), https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207159119.
38 University of Amsterdam, “Social Media Polarizes Politics for a Different Reason Than You Might Think,” Phys.org, October 12, 2022, https://phys.org/news/2022-10-social-media-polarizes-politics.html.
39 Victoria A. Parker et al., “The Ties That Blind: Misperceptions of the Opponent Fringe and the Miscalibration of Political Contempt,” PsyArXiv, October 1, 2021, https://doi:10.31234/osf.io/cr23g.
40 Ruby Edlin and Lawrence Norden, “Poll of Election Officials Shows High Turnover amid Safety Threats and Political Interference,” Brennan Center for Justice, April 25, 2023, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/poll-election-officials-shows-high-turnover-amid-safety-threats-and.
41 Jim Hoft, “What’s Up, Ruby?… BREAKING: Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED,” Gateway Pundit, December 3, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20201204030147/https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/ruby-breaking-crooked-democrat-filmed-pulling-suitcases-ballots-georgia-identified. Rudy Giuliani, who had served as Trump’s personal lawyer, participated in defaming the women, who were awarded $148 million in damages in a defamation case against him. Eileen Sullivan, “Jury Orders Giuliani to Pay $148 Million to Election Workers He Defamed,” New York Times, December 15, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/politics/rudy-giuliani-defamation-trial-damages.html.
42 Anita Snow, “Armed Groups Can Monitor Arizona Ballot Drop Boxes, Federal Judge Rules,” PBS NewsHour, October 28, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/armed-group-can-monitor-arizona-ballot-drop-boxes-federal-judge-rules.
43 Melody Gutierrez, “Anti-vaccine Activists, Mask Opponents Target Public Health Officials—at Their Homes,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-18/anti-mask-protesters-target-county-health-officers; Stephanie Lai, “Dozens Protest Outside of Home of L.A. County’s Public Health Director,” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-11-29/dozens-protest-outside-of-la-health-director-barbara-ferrers-echo-park-home.
44 Anna Maria Barry-Jester et al., “Pandemic Backlash Jeopardizes Public Health Powers, Leaders,” KFF Health News, December 15, 2020, https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/pandemic-backlash-jeopardizes-public-health-powers-leaders.
45 Prof. Peter Hotez, MD, PhD (@PeterHotez), “Spotify Has Stopped Even Sort of Trying to Stem Joe Rogan’s Vaccine Misinformation. It’s really true @annamerlan just awful,” Twitter, June 17, 2023, 7:05 a.m., https://twitter.com/PeterHotez/status/1670040001751445504.
46 Peter Hotez, “Vaccine Scientist Speaks Out on Harassment After Joe Rogan Challenged Him,” interview by Erin Burnett posted to YouTube by CNN, June 22, 2023, at 5:49, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGlE4f5P5oI.
47 Joe Rogan (@joerogan), “Peter, if you claim what RFKjr is saying is ‘misinformation’ I am offering you $100,000.00 to the charity of your choice if you’re willing to debate him on my show with no time limit,” Twitter, June 17, 2023, 3:27 p.m., https://twitter.com/joerogan/status/1670196590928068609.
48 Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Twitter, June 17, 2023, 4:58 p.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1670219488485154816.
49 Follower counts as of June 18, 2023.
50 Keren Landman, “Joe Rogan Wants a ‘Debate’ on Vaccine Science. Don’t Give It to Him,” Vox, June 22, 2023, vox.com/2023/6/22/23768539/rogan-rfk-hotez-debate-vaccine-deniers-better.
51 Jeremy Littau, “Social Media Has Collapsed Good Debate,” The Atlantic, June 24, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/06/joe-rogan-rfk-jr-interview-debate/674515.
52 Mark Norris, “Vaccine Expert Dr. Peter Hotez Harassed Outside Houston Home After Weekend of Online Attacks,” Texas Public Radio, June 19, 2023, https://www.tpr.org/public-health/2023-06-19/vaccine-expert-dr-peter-hotez-harassed-outside-houston-home-after-weekend-of-online-attacks.
53 For multiple perspectives see Jeremy Littau, “Social Media Has Collapsed Good Debate,” Atlantic, June 24, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/06/joe-rogan-rfk-jr-interview-debate/674515, and Mike Solana, “Debatable Tactics,” Pirate Wires, June 19, 2023, https://www.piratewires.com/p/pirate-wires-rogans-debatable-tactic.
54 Anna Merlan, “Meet the New, Dangerous Fringe of the Anti-vaccination Movement,” Jezebel, June 29, 2015, https://jezebel.com/meet-the-new-dangerous-fringe-of-the-anti-vaccination-171 3438567.
55 This opinion has since become far more visible and even mainstream, with parents advocating for ballot measures to ensure that curriculum choices are restored. Mike Ege, “California Math Wars: San Franciscans Demand Return of 8th Grade Algebra,” San Francisco Standard, November 13, 2023, https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/13/california-math-wars-san-franciscans-demand-8th-grade-algebra.
56 Parker et al., “The Ties That Blind.”
57 Anthony Adragna, Daniella Diaz, and Jennifer Scholtes, “Multiple Members Are Detailing Death Threats and Other Intimidation They’ve Faced for Opposing Jim Jordan’s Speakership Bid,” Politico, October 19, 2023, https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/10/19/congress/speaker-race-threats-house-00122416.
58 Roth would be targeted by a mob himself shortly after, in December 2022, when Elon Musk baselessly made allegations suggesting that he condoned child sexualization online. He wrote about the experience in Yoel Roth, “I Was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. This Is What Could Become of It,” New York Times, November 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/opinion/twitter-yoel-roth-elon-musk.html.
59 Renée DiResta et al., “Assessing Inauthentic Networks Commenting on the US Midterms,” Election Integrity Partnership, November 1, 2022, https://www.eipartnership.net/blog/inauthentic-foreign-networks.
60 Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), profile page, Twitter, November 2, 2022, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20221102055859/https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec.
61 P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Boston: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 129.
62 Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “The ‘independent analysts’ citied by Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity were behind censoring the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020”, Twitter, November 2, 2022, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20221102194354/https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status /1587836232582692871.
63 Renée DiResta, “The Twitter Files Are a Missed Opportunity,” The Atlantic, December 15, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/twitter-files-content-moderation-transparency/672468.
64 Devin Coldewey, “Deconstructing ‘The Twitter Files,’” TechCrunch, January 13, 2023, https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/13/deconstructing-the-twitter-files.
65 Novelist Michael Crichton coined a phrase to describe the phenomenon of trusting a source in one area while forgetting its unreliability in another: Gell-Mann Amnesia. “You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well… You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” Michael Crichton, “Why Speculate?” (speech, International Leadership Forum, La Jolla, California, April 26, 2002), Michael Crichton, Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-whyspeculate.html.
66 Robert Collier, “Venezuelan Politics Suit Bay Area Activists’ Talents / Locals Help Build Chavez’s Image, Provide Polling Data,” SFGATE, August 21, 2004, https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Venezuelan-politics-suit-Bay-Area-activists-2700433.php.
67 Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger), “46. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time,” Twitter, December 19, 2022, 10:36 a.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230916181050/https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1604908670063906817.
68 Oliver Darcy, “Elon Musk Claims the FBI Paid Twitter to ‘Censor Info from the Public.’ Here’s What the Twitter Files Actually Show,” CNN, December 20, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/media/elon-musk-fbi-twitter-reliable-sources/index.html.
69 Steve Nelson, “House GOP Wants FBI’s Twitter Censorship, Reimbursement Records,” House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, December 23, 2022, https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/house-gop-wants-fbis-twitter-censorship-reimbursement-records.
70 D’Angelo Gore, “FBI Reimbursed Twitter for Providing User Information,” FactCheck.org, February 6, 2023, https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/fbi-reimbursed-twitter-for-providing-user-information.
71 Renée DiResta, “Fiction vs Reality: My Texts with Michael Shellenberger,” Renee’s Substack, March 31, 2023, https://reneediresta.substack.com/p/fiction-vs-reality-my-texts-with; Sam Harris, “Social Media & Public Trust: A Conversation with Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and Renée DiResta,” video posted to YouTube by Sam Harris, February 1, 2023, 1:08:52, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVeL5HX4uDY.
72 Bari Weiss (@bariweiss), “THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO. TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS,” Twitter, December 28, 2022, 4:15 p.m., https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600.
73 “Libs of TikTok,” Wikipedia, last modified September 25, 2023, 4:56 p.m., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libs_of_TikTok.
74 See notes 46–48 in Chapter 5 for a collection of research discussing conservative content performance on social media.
75 “Terms of Service,” InfoWars, accessed December 19, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20231205213951/https://www.infowars.com/terms-of-service.
76 Trash Discourse (@ThaWoodChipper), “Breaking: FBI releases Cyber Plan w/ @kyleseraphin @americamission_,” Twitter Spaces, March 2, 2023, 8:59 a.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230324011816/https://twitter.com/ThaWoodChipper/status/1631338520697802752?s=20. Create audio archive.
77 “Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” 118th Congress, US House of Representatives Committee Repository, March 9, 2023, https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=115442.
78 Andrea Bernstein, “Republican Rep. Jim Jordan Issues Sweeping Information Requests to Universities Researching Disinformation,” ProPublica, March 22, 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/jim-jordan-disinformation-subpoena-universities.
79 Jim Jordan refused to cooperate with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, commenting, “This request is far outside the bounds of any legitimate inquiry, violates core constitutional principles and would serve to further erode legislative norms.” He subsequently defied a subpoena from the committee, writing, “Public statements by members of the Select Committee indicate that it seeks to use its subpoena authority for improper motives and for the self-aggrandizement of its members.” See Luke Broadwater, “Jim Jordan Refuses to Cooperate with Jan. 6 Panel,” New York Times, updated October 13, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/09/us/politics/jim-jordan-jan-6-panel.html; Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan), “Response to the January 6th Committee,” Twitter, May 25, 2022, 4:00 p.m., https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1529598191854923776/photo/3.
80 Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop), “To be sure, @MikeBenzCyber and @FFO_Freedom have made themselves indispensable in bringing to light the largest government censorship scheme in US history,” Twitter, May 11, 2023, 8:38 a.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230920235530/https://twitter.com/RepDanBishop/status/1656760668911988774.
81 Michael Shellenberger, “‘The Most Dangerous People in America Right Now,’” Public (blog), March 23, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230323150149/https://public.substack.com/p/the-most-dangerous-people-in-america; Michael Shellenberger, “Why Renee DiResta Leads the Censorship Industry,” Public (blog), April 3, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230403185119/https://public.substack.com/p/why-renee-diresta-leads-the-censorship.
82 America First Legal, “Jill Hines & Jim Hoft v. Alex Stamos, et al.,” blog post at https://aflegal.org/litigation/jill-hines-jim-hoft-v-alex-stamos-et-al. A copy of the lawsuit can be found at https://dockets.justia.com/docket/louisiana/lawdce/3:2023cv00571/199277.
83 Mike Masnick, “The Good, the Bad, and the Incredibly Ugly in the Court Ruling Regarding Government Contacts with Social Media,” Techdirt, July 6, 2023, https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/06/the-good-the-bad-and-the-incredibly-ugly-in-the-court-ruling-regarding-government-contacts-with-social-media.
84 “Stanford University Files Amicus Brief in Missouri v. Biden Appeal,” press release, Stanford University Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, July 28, 2023, https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/stanford-university-files-amicus-brief-missouri-v-biden-appeal; Missouri v. Biden, 3:22-CV-01213 (W.D. La. Mar. 20, 2023).
85 Kate Starbird, “Addressing Falsehoods and the Manipulated Narrative of House Judiciary Committee Majority Document: ‘The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded with Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,’” University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, August 23, 2023, https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/08/23/starbird-house-judiciary-committee-report.
86 Jonathan Blitzer, “Jim Jordan’s Conspiratorial Quest for Power: How the Ohio Republican Built an Insurgent Bid for Speaker on the Lies of Donald Trump,” New Yorker, October 21, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/jim-jordans-conspiratorial-quest-for-power.
87 Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel, “G.O.P. Targets Researchers Who Study Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election,” New York Times, June 19, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/technology/gop-disinformation-researchers-2024-election.html.
88 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 34.
89 Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 61.
90 Ibid., 200.
91 Post from Medhi Hasan documenting this interaction is at Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan), “Me: ‘It’s just error after error, Matt?’ @mtaibbi: ‘Well, that is an error.’ Watch me confront Matt Taibbi with multiple, unacknowledged, and glaring mistakes in his Twitter Files reporting…,” Twitter, April 6, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230407052848/https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1644064242419617803. Media summary with embedded video can be found here: Justin Baragona, “MSNBC Host Makes Matt Taibbi Squirm over His ‘Twitter Files’ Errors,” Daily Beast, April 6, 2023, https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbc-host-mehdi-hasan-makes-matt-taibbi-squirm-over-his-twitter-files-errors.
92 Brandy Zadrozny, “Michael Benz, a Conservative Crusader Against Online Censorship, Appears to Have a Secret History as an Alt-Right Persona,” NBC News, October 6, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/michael-benz-rising-voice-conservative-criticism-online-censorship-rcna119213.
93 Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer), “The notion that ‘frame game’ was engaged in ‘de-radicalization’ is absurd. Though he obviously was trying to channel the AltRight in a certain direction for an outside player,” Twitter, October 6, 2023, 8:04 p.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20231009184131/https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1710491232487854111.
94 Excerpted from a thread that Frame Game (sometimes “framegames”) posted to Twitter and then archived to his Steemit blog. The post appears with the title “Thread 1: A Jewish Perspective on Jewish Influence” and the following description: “Below is a repost of my viral Twitter thread with over 5 million total impressions over the course of a week. With Twitter’s speech bonfire fully underway, this thread is being archived here in eternity’s bosom. It is reproduced with no edits, and was bound by Twitter’s 140 character limit at the time of its writing, in August 2017.” See framegames, “THREAD 1: A Jewish Perspective on Jewish Influence,” steemit, https://web.archive.org/web/20231007003239/https://steemit.com/blog/@framegames/thread-1-a-jewish-perspective-on-jewish-influence-on-the-west.
95 We were sued in May 2023 in Texas as “de facto government agents” by the “New Civil Liberties Alliance” on behalf of activists alleging they were injured by their COVID-19 vaccines. See Dressen v. Flaherty, “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief,” 3:23-cv-00155 (S.D. Tex. 2023), https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Dressen-Complaint-Filed-5.22.23.pdf.
96 Naomi Nix and Cat Zakrzewski, “U.S. Stops Helping Big Tech Spot Foreign Meddling Amid GOP Legal Threats,” Washington Post, November 30, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com /technology/2023/11/30/biden-foreign-disinformation-social-media-election-interference/.
97 Darius Tahir, “The NIH halts a research project. Is it self-censorship?,” CBS News, August 5, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-halts-research-project-is-it-self-censorship/.
98 Zach Greenberg, “Chilling open records request targets University of Washington faculty, threatens academic freedom,” The FIRE newsdesk, November 15, 2022, https://www.thefire.org /news/chilling-open-records-request-targets-university-washington-faculty-threatens-acade mic-freedom.
99 Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conpiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 9.
CHAPTER 9: THE PATH FORWARD
1 Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 97.
2 Ibid., 143.
3 Forrest Davis, “Father Coughlin,” The Atlantic, December 1935, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1935/12/father-coughlin/652107.
4 Clyde Haberman, “Today in History: The Father Coughlin Story,” PBS, March 9, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/2022/03/09/today-in-history-the-father-coughlin-story.
5 Thomas Doherty, “The Deplatforming of Father Coughlin,” Slate, January 21, 2021, https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/father-coughlin-deplatforming-radio-social-media.html.
6 Tianyi Wang, “Media, Pulpit, and Populist Persuasion: Evidence from Father Coughlin,” American Economic Review 111, no. 9 (2021): 3064–3092, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20200513.
7 “Father Coughlin Blames Jews for Nazi Violence,” History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust, https://newspapers.ushmm.org/events/father-coughlin-blames-jews-for-nazi-violence.
8 Davis, “Father Coughlin.”
9 Doherty, “The Deplatforming.”
10 Diane Cypkin, “A Rhetorical Critical Analysis of Father Coughlin’s Radio Broadcast, November 20, 1938, or Call It What You Will… It’s Still Anti-Semitism!,” Journal of Radio Studies 4, no. 1 (1997): 134–150, https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529709391688.
11 “Father Coughlin Blames Jews,” History Unfolded.
12 Bill Kovarik, “That Time Private US Media Companies Stepped in to Silence the Falsehoods and Incitements of a Major Public Figure… in 1938,” The Conversation, January 15, 2021, https://theconversation.com/that-time-private-us-media-companies-stepped-in-to-silence-the-falsehoods-and-incitements-of-a-major-public-figure-in-1938-153157.
13 “Priest Won’t Meet WMCA Conditions,” New York Times, November 27, 1938, 42, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1938/11/27/99571181.html?pageNumber=42#.
14 Kovarik, “That Time Private US Media Companies.”
15 Doherty, “The Deplatforming.”
16 Otto D. Tolischus, “Germany to Keep Dieckhoff at Home,” New York Times, November 27, 1938, 46, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1938/11/27/99571225.html.
17 Kovarik, “That Time Private US Media Companies.”
18 “6,000 Here Cheer Coughlin’s Name,” New York Times, December 19, 1938, 6, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1938/12/16/98873857.html#.
19 “Fewer Coughlin Pickets; Protest at Radio Station over Ban Is Repeated,” New York Times, December 26, 1938, 27, https://www.nytimes.com/1938/12/26/archives/fewer-coughlin-pickets-protest-at-radio-station-over-ban-is.html; “WMCA Picketing Limited; Confined by Police to Broadway Side of Building,” New York Times, June 19, 1939, 8, https://www.nytimes.com/1939/06/19/archives/wmca-picketing-limited-confined-by-police-to-broadway-side-of.html.
20 David Goodman, “Before Hate Speech: Charles Coughlin, Free Speech and Listeners’ Rights,” Patterns of Prejudice 49, no. 3 (2015): 199–224, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2015.10 48972.
21 “Coughlin Copies Goebbels Speech,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, December 31, 1938, 1, published online at Newspapers.com, September 23, 2018, https://www.newspapers.com/article/23966340.
22 “Coughlin Supports Christian Front; While Not a Member, ‘I Do Not Disassociate Myself from Movement,’ Priest Says,” New York Times, January 22, 1940, 1, https://www.nytimes.com/1940/01/22/archives/coughlin-supports-christian-front-while-not-a-member-i-do-not.html.
23 The FBI raid of the headquarters of the Christian Front led to the arrest of seventeen men who came to be called the “Brooklyn Boys.” However, sixteen of the seventeen were found not guilty. See Andrew Lapin, “Ep. 7: Sedition,” Radioactive: The Father Coughlin Story, March 9, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/2022/03/09/ep-7-sedition; J. P. O’Malley, “FBI Files Shine Light on Homegrown Nazi Plot to Overthrow US Government During WWII,” Times of Israel, January 28, 2022, https://www.timesofisrael.com/fbi-files-shine-light-on-homegrown-nazi-plot-to-overthrow-us-government-during-wwii; Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Christian Front,” Britannica, n.d., https://www.britannica.com/topic/Christian-Front.
24 Kovarik, “That Time Private US Media Companies.”
25 “Father Coughlin Blames Jews,” History Unfolded.
26 Stewart M. Hoover and Douglas K. Wagner, “History and Policy in American Broadcast Treatment of Religion,” Media, Culture and Society 19, no. 1 (January 1997): 7–27, published online at Religion Online, https://www.religion-online.org/article/history-and-policy-in-american-broadcast-treatment-of-religion.
27 Ibid.
28 In 1949, the FCC implemented the Fairness Doctrine, which aimed to regulate public discourse on controversial topics in broadcast media by requiring equal time for balanced opposing viewpoints. This rule itself sparked controversy due to its vague criteria for what qualified as a viewpoint requiring equal debate. In 1987, under President Ronald Reagan, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, citing its stifling impact on free speech.
29 Kate Klonick, “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech,” Harvard Law Review 131, no. 6 (April 2018): 1598–1670.
30 Christopher St. Aubin and Jacob Liedke, “Most Americans Favor Restrictions on False Information, Violent Content Online,” Pew Research Center, July 20, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/20/most-americans-favor-restrictions-on-false-information-violent-content-online.
31 Daphne Keller, “Lawful but Awful? Control over Legal Speech by Platforms, Governments, and Internet Users,” University of Chicago Law Review Online, June 28, 2022, https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/2022/06/28/keller-control-over-speech.
32 Renée DiResta, “The Digital Maginot Line,” Ribbonfarm, November 28, 2018, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/the-digital-maginot-line.
33 Giuseppe Russo et al., “Spillover of Antisocial Behavior from Fringe Platforms: The Unintended Consequences of Community Banning,” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media ICWSM 16 (2023): 742–753, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.09803.
34 Jeff Kosseff, Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).
35 Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing), “Twitter canceled a deal with @realdailywire to premiere What is a Woman?…,” Twitter, June 1, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230601142311/https://twitter.com/JeremyDBoreing/status/1664255321630552065.
36 Some of Twitter’s policies regularly intersected with active fronts in the culture war, turning the policies themselves into a matter of controversy as well as an opportunity to capture attention. For example, it had a long-standing rule that prohibited harassing individual transgender users (such as by referring to them with prior names or pronouns) while still allowing criticism of trans-related policies and laws or identity politics writ large. This attempt to minimize the harassment of individual users, however, was often framed as inherently anticonservative; some argued that it forced conservatives to use pronouns that they disagreed with, which impinged upon their freedom of speech. The targets of the speech, however, were also users who wanted to express themselves on Twitter as well. As with many moderation decisions, calls sometimes hinged on whether individual moderators felt that a word or phrase was harassment, merely offensive, or an overreaction by the reportee. More importantly, however, the policy became a source of secondary attention-capture for clout and profit, as those who alleged that they were moderated unfairly—or felt they went unheard—subsequently commanded attention cycles highlighting the incidents.
37 Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing), “I appreciate the reply. We posted the two clips flagged by Twitter and they were indeed labeled ‘hateful conduct’ and the share functions were disabled on the…,” Twitter, Juny 1, 2023, https://twitter.com/JeremyDBoreing/status/1664332765226057730?s=20.
38 Daysia Tolentino and David Ingram, “Musk’s response to an anti-trans video sparks 24 hours of chaos at Twitter,” NBC News, June 3, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/musk-elon-twitter-ella-irwin-trans-video-what-is-a-woman-stream-rcna87429.
39 Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice, 5th ed. (1984; reis., Boston: Pearson, 2009), 210–211.
40 “Community Principles,” TikTok, last updated March 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/community-guidelines/en/community-principles.
41 “Ensuring Respect for Free Expression, Through Independent Judgement,” Oversight Board, https://www.oversightboard.com.
42 For example, Twitter and Facebook have programs to ensure that moderation actions against high-profile users are checked by multiple reviewers, including at times the executive team. Preliminary indications from some of our data in the 2020 election suggested that lower-follower accounts were actioned for election misinformation even as influencers with far more reach did not appear to be. This is perhaps a natural defensive stance for Big Tech platforms, but it preferentially favors those with large audiences or offline power. Renée DiResta and Matt Debutts, “‘Newsworthiness,’ Trump, and the Facebook Oversight Board,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 26, 2021, https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/facebook-oversight-board-2.php.
43 For a nuanced explanation of how content moderation work is done and the mental health impacts it has, see Casey Newton, “The Trauma Floor: The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America,” The Verge, February 25, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona.
44 “Singapore Tightens the Reins on Extreme Social Media Content,” Japan Times, November 12, 2022, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2022/11/12/general/social-media-content-law-singapore.
45 Yashraj Sharma, “Twitter Accused of Censorship in India as It Blocks Modi Critics,” The Guardian, April 5, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accused-of-censorship-in-india-as-it-blocks-modi-critics-elon-musk.
46 Charlie Savage, “Trump’s Order Targeting Social Media Sites, Explained,” New York Times, May 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/us/politics/trump-twitter-explained.html.
47 David Shepardson, “Biden Revokes Trump Order That Sought to Limit Social Media Firms’ Protections,” Reuters, May 17, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology/biden-revokes-trump-order-that-sought-limit-social-media-firms-protections-2021-05-15.
48 Fletcher Schoen and Christopher J. Lamb, “Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference,” Institute for National Strategic Studies, June 1, 2012, https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/693590/deception-disinformation-and-strategic-communications-how-one-interagency-group.
49 Fred Barbash, “U.S. Ties ‘Klan’ Olympic Hate Mail to KGB,” Washington Post, August 7, 1984, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/08/07/us-ties-klan-olympic-hate-mail-to-kgb/80918fe8-fcf0-46cf-bb58-726ee46d8ce9.
50 Michael Dhunjishah, “Countering Propaganda and Disinformation: Bring Back the Active Measures Working Group?,” War Room, July 7, 2017, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/countering-propaganda-disinformation-bring-back-active-measures-working-group.
51 Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/channel/jawboning.
52 Will Oremus with David DiMolfetta, “Disinfo Researchers Are Under Pressure from the Right. They’re Starting to Push Back,” Washington Post, August 3, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/03/disinfo-researchers-are-under-pressure-right-theyre-starting-push-back.
53 Mike Masnick, “5th Circuit Cleans Up District Court’s Silly Jawboning Ruling About the Biden Admin, Trims It Down to More Accurately Reflect the 1st Amendment,” Techdirt, September 11, 2023, https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/11/5th-circuit-cleans-up-district-courts-silly-jawboning-ruling-about-the-biden-admin-trims-it-down-to-more-accurately-reflect-the-1st-amendment.
54 Stanford University filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, as we had with the Fifth Circuit, fact-checking the claims about us and our work. That can be found at http://www.supremecourt.gov /DocketPDF/23/23-411/294255/20231226143930837_Murthy%20v.%20Missouri%20--%20SCOTUS%20Amicus%20FINAL.pdf.
55 Yoel Roth, “Getting the Facts Straight: Some Observations on the Fifth Circuit Ruling in Missouri v. Biden,” Jawboning (blog), Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, September 27, 2023, https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/getting-the-facts-straight-some-observations-on-the-fifth-circuit-ruling-in-missouri-v-biden-1.
56 State of Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden Jr., et al., 3:22-CV-01213 (W.D. La. Jul. 4, 2023), https://ago.mo.gov/wp-content/uploads/missouri-v-biden-ruling.pdf.
57 Robby Soave, “Inside the Facebook Files: Emails Reveal the CDC’s Role in Silencing COVID-19 Dissent,” Reason, January 19, 2023, https://reason.com/2023/01/19/facebook-files-emails-cdc-covid-vaccines-censorship.
58 For coverage of the controversy, see David Ingram, “Elon Musk’s Twitter Faces Censorship Allegations in India Free Speech Battle,” NBC News, January 25, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/modi-twitter-bbc-musk-elon-documentary-watch-video-rcna67497. Also see Lumen’s post about Twitter ceasing contributions: Lumen (@lumendatabase), “As of April 15th, 2023, Twitter has not submitted copies of any of the takedown notices it receives to Lumen…” Twitter, April 27, 2023, 4:25 p.m., https://twitter.com/lumendatabase/status/1651578251599310849.
59 Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).
60 Renée DiResta, “How Online Mobs Act like Flocks of Birds,” NOEMA, November 3, 2022, https://www.noemamag.com/how-online-mobs-act-like-flocks-of-birds.
61 Kaitlyn Tiffany, “Very, Very Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/youtube-rabbit-holes-american-politics/675186.
62 Sandra González-Bailón et al., “Asymmetric Ideological Segregation in Exposure to Political News on Facebook,” Science 381, no. 6656 (July 2023): 392–398, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ade7138.
63 Kai Kupferschmidt, “Does Social Media Polarize Voters? Unprecedented Experiments on Facebook Users Reveal Surprises,” Science, July 27, 2023, https://www.science.org/content/article/does-social-media-polarize-voters-unprecedented-experiments-facebook-users-reveal; Brendan Nyhan et al., “Like-Minded Sources on Facebook Are Prevalent but Not Polarizing,” Nature 620 (July 2023): 137–144, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06795-x.
64 Justin Hendrix and Paul M. Barrett, “The Meta Studies: Nuanced Findings, Corporate Spin, and Media Oversimplification,” Tech Policy Press, August 2, 2023, https://www.techpolicy.press/the-meta-studies-nuanced-findings-corporate-spin-and-media-oversimplification.
65 Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn, “Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness Across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance,” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, October 26, 2023, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/bridging-systems.
66 Tom Cunningham, “Ranking by Engagement,” Tom Cunningham, May 8, 2023, https://tecunningham.github.io/posts/2023-04-28-ranking-by-engagement.html; “Ranking by Engagement,” Integrity Institute, May 8, 2023, https://integrityinstitute.org/blog/ranking-by-engagement.
67 Jonathan Stray, “Designing Recommender Systems to Depolarize,” First Monday 27, no. 5 (2022), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i5.12604.
68 For example, studies suggest that platforms play a role in driving people to untrustworthy websites and that Facebook played a smaller role in 2020 than in 2016. Ryan C. Moore, Ross Dahlke, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Exposure to Untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 US Election,” Nature Human Behaviour 7 (2023): 1096–1105, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01564-2.
69 Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand, “Fighting Misinformation on Social Media Using Crowdsourced Judgements of News Source Quality,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 7 (January 28, 2019): 2521–2526, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1806781116.
70 Eric Jaffe, “The ‘Contagion’ of Social Networks,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2010, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-sep-13-la-he-social-networks-health-20100913-story.html.
71 Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud’s nonprofit organization New_ Public maintains a Substack with research into how norms shape digital spaces. See, for example, “Understanding How Norms Shape Digital Spaces,” New_ Public, Substack, December 10, 2023, https://newpublic.substack.com/p/understanding-how-norms-shape-digital.
72 Philip Bump, “From the Election to the Riot, Nearly a Third of Facebook’s Top Link Posts Were from Right-Wing Media,” Washington Post, January 12, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/12/election-riot-nearly-third-facebooks-top-link-posts-were-right-wing-media.
73 Renée DiResta, “Free Speech Is Not the Same as Free Reach,” Wired, August 30, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-free-reach.
74 “Freedom of Speech, Not Reach: An Update on Our Enforcement Philosophy,” Twitter Blog, April 17, 2023, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2023/freedom-of-speech-not-reach-an-update-on-our-enforcement-philosophy.
75 Di Zhao, Pouriya, and Auro, “Twitter: The Algorithm,” GitHub repository, 2023, https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm.
76 Ragul Bharvaga et al., “Gobo: A System for Exploring User Control of Invisible Algorithms in Social Media,” CSCW (2019): 151–155, https://doi.org/10.1145/3311957.3359452.
77 Francis Fukuyama et al., “Report of the Working Group on Platform Scale,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, November 17, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/report-working-group-platform-scale.
78 Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, “From Community Governance to Customer Service and Back Again: Re-examining Pre-web Models of Online Governance to Address Platforms’ Crisis of Legitimacy,” Social Media and Society 9, no. 3 (July-September 2023): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196864.
79 Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—and What We Can Do About It (London: Piatkus, 2023), also summarized in brief essay form in Tobias Rose-Stockwell, “Facebook’s Problems Can Be Solved with Design,” Quartz, April 30, 2018, https://qz.com/1264547/facebooks-problems-can-be-solved-with-design.
80 James Vincent, “Twitter Is Bringing Its ‘Read Before You Retweet’ Prompt to All Users,” The Verge, September 25, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455635/twitter-read-before-you-tweet-article-prompt-rolling-out-globally-soon.
81 Avie Schneider and Scott Horsley, “How Stock Market Circuit Breakers Work,” NPR, March 9, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813682567/how-stock-market-circuit-breakers-work.
82 Renée DiResta and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, “How to Stop Misinformation Before It Gets Shared,” Wired, March 26, 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stop-misinformation-before-it-gets-shared.
83 Renée DiResta, “Elon Musk Is Fighting for Attention, Not Free Speech,” The Atlantic, April 14, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/elon-musk-buy-twitter-free-speech/629571.
84 For more suggestions on friction, see Ellen P. Goodman and Karen Kornbluh, “Social Media Platforms Need to Flatten the Curve of Dangerous Misinformation,” Slate, August 21, 2020, https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/facebook-twitter-youtube-misinformation-virality-speed-bump.html; Ellen P. Goodman, “Digital Information Fidelity and Friction,” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, February 26, 2020, https://knightcolumbia.org /content/digital-fidelity-and-friction; Brett M. Frischmann and Susan Benesch, “Friction-in-Design Regulation as 21st Century Time, Place, and Manner Restriction,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 25 (August 2023): 377–447, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4178647. Also see the library of design interventions broached by user experience (UX) researchers that can be found at the Integrity Institute’s website at https://integrityinstitute.org.
85 St. Aubin and Liedke, “Most Americans Favor.”
86 For an in-depth examination of these volunteer moderators as a civic labor force in online governance, see J. Nathan Matias, “The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online,” Social Media + Society, April 4, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305119836778.
87 Spandana Singh, “Everything in Moderation: An Analysis of How Internet Platforms Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Moderate User-Generated Content,” New American, July 22, 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/everything-moderation-analysis-how-internet-platforms-are-using-artificial-intelligence-moderate-user-generated-content.
88 “Topologies and Tribulations of Gettr: A Month in the Life of a New Alt-Network,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, August 12, 2021, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/topologies-and-tribulations-gettr.
89 David Thiel and Miles McCain, “Gabufacturing Dissent: An In-Depth Analysis of Gab,” Stanford Digital Repository, June 1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.25740/ns280ry2029.
90 Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, “A Pro-Trump Social Network Wants to Corner the Anti-vax ‘Jizz Market,’” Rolling Stone, March 16, 2023, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/covid-vaccines-infertility-antivax-gettr-social-media-1234697898.
91 Jay Caspian Kang, “What Bluesky Tells Us About the Future of Social Media,” New Yorker, May 12, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-bluesky-tells-us-about-the-future-of-social-media.
92 Alex Heath, “This Is What Instagram’s Upcoming Twitter Competitor Looks Like,” The Verge, June 8, 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub.
93 DiResta, “How Online Mobs Act.”
94 Joseph B. Bak-Coleman et al., “Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 21, 2021, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025 764118.
95 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond (London: Penguin Books, 2006).
96 Anya Schiffrin, “Fighting Disinformation with Media Literacy—in 1939,” Columbia Journalism Review, October 10, 2018, https://www.cjr.org/innovations/institute-propaganda-analysis.php.
97 Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Propaganda, How to Recognize It and Deal with It (New York: Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938), 2.
98 Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939). The ABCs of propaganda were “ASCERTAIN the conflict element in the propaganda you are analyzing. BEHOLD your own reaction to this conflict element. CONCERN yourself with today’s propaganda associated with today’s conflicts. DOUBT that your opinions are ‘your very own.’ EVALUATE, therefore, with the greatest care, your own propagandas. FIND THE FACTS before you come to any conclusion. GUARD always, finally, against omnibus words.”
99 The “Tricks of the Trade” were articulated in Chapter 3 of The Fine Art of Propaganda. I have selected the most appropriate modern emojis available, but here note the original pictographs chosen: Name Calling was symbolized by “the ancient sign of condemnation used by the Vestal Virgins in the Roman Coliseum, a thumb turned down”; Glittering Generality was symbolized by “a glittering gem that may or may not have its apparent value”; Transfer was symbolized by a mask of the style worn by ancient Greek and Roman actors; Testimonial was symbolized by a seal and ribbons, the “stamp of authority”; Plain Folks was symbolized by an old shoe (period slang for an old friend); Card Stacking was symbolized by an ace of spades, “a card traditionally used to signify treachery”; and Band Wagon was symbolized by a bandmaster’s hat and baton.
100 Anya Schiffrin, “Fighting Disinformation in the 1930s: Clyde Miller and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis,” International Journal of Communication 16 (2022): 3715–3741.
101 Philipp Markolin, “Distort, Discredit, Dismiss: The Manipulation Playbook of Anti-science Actors, Part 2,” The Protagonist Future?, May 15, 2023, https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/distort-discredit-dismiss.
102 Stephan Lewandowsky, Ronald E. Robertson, and Renée DiResta, “Challenges in Understanding Human-Algorithm Entanglement During Online Information Consumption,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, July 10, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231180809.
103 For a full discussion of recent studies examining intervention and responses to political rumors, see Adam J. Berinsky, Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).
104 Lisa Belkin, “Procter & Gamble Fights Satan Story,” New York Times, April 18, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/18/garden/procter-gamble-fights-satan-story.html.
105 Robert Skvarla, “When 1980s Satanic Panic Targeted Procter & Gamble,” Atlas Obscura, July 13, 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/procter-gamble-satan-conspiracy-theory.
106 See Jean-Noël Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations and Images (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013), chap. 7–8.
107 Laura Blumenfeld, “Procter Gamble’s Devil of a Problem,” Washington Post, July 15, 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/07/15/procter-gambles-devil-of-a-problem/36f27641-e679-40f4-ac02-9d12c59a2f3b.
108 Kapferer, Rumors, 235.
109 Jessica Contrera, “A QAnon Con: How the Viral Wayfair Sex Trafficking Lie Hurt Real Kids,” Washington Post, December 16, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2021/wayfair-qanon-sex-trafficking-conspiracy.
110 Kate Starbird et al., “What Makes an Election Rumor Go Viral? Look at These 10 Factors,” Neiman Lab, October 25, 2022, https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/election-rumors-gone-viral.
111 Stephanie Saul, “Looking, Very Closely, for Voter Fraud,” New York Times, September 16, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-true-the-vote-are-looking-very-closely-for-voter-fraud.html.
112 As writer Robert Tracinski points out, secret conspiracies and cabals are a staple of Hollywood, so we perhaps shouldn’t be surprised when people think that’s how our political system works. For more on the connection between entertainment tropes and those that appear in political conspiracy theories, see Robert Tracinski, “The Paranoid Style in American Entertainment,” The UnPopulist, June 1, 2023, https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-paranoid-style-in-american-entertainment.
113 Reuters Staff, “Evidence Disproves Claims of Italian Conspiracy to Meddle in U.S. Election (Known as #ItalyGate),” Reuters, January 15, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-debunking-italy-gate-idUSKBN29K2N8.
114 Jigsaw, “7 Insights from Interviewing Conspiracy Theory Believers,” Medium, March 17, 2021, https://medium.com/jigsaw/7-insights-from-interviewing-conspiracy-theory-believers-c475005f8598; Renée DiResta and Beth Goldberg, “‘Prebunking’ Health Misinformation Tropes Can Stop Their Spread,” Wired, August 28, 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/prebunking-health-misinformation-tropes-can-stop-their-spread.
115 Garret Morrow et al., “The Emerging Science of Content Labeling: Contextualizing Social Media Content Moderation,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 73, no. 10 (2022): 1365–1386, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24637.
116 Zeve Sanderson et al., “Twitter Flagged Donald Trump’s Tweets with Election Misinformation: They Continued to Spread Both on and off the Platform,” Harvard Misinformation Review, August 24, 2021, https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/twitter-flagged-donald-trumps-tweets-with-election-misinformation-they-continued-to-spread-both-on-and-off-the-platform.
117 Stephan Lewandowsky and Sander van der Linden, “Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking,” European Review of Social Psychology 32, no. 2 (2021): 348–384, https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2021.1876983.
118 A channel of experimental intervention content created by Google Jigsaw can be found here: Info Interventions, YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiov-3rtgg9Nl_ezyWyOHpQ.
119 Josh Compton, Ben Jackson, and James A. Dimmock, “Persuading Others to Avoid Persuasion: Inoculation Theory and Resistant Health Attitudes,” Frontiers in Psychology 7, article 122 (2016): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00122.
120 “Happy Ending,” TV Tropes, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HappyEnding.
121 Ryan Schocket, “This Woman Tweeted About Having Coffee Every Day with Her Husband—the Internet Tore Her Apart,” BuzzFeed, October 24, 2022, https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanschocket2/woman-backlash-for-coffee-husband-tweet.
122 Ezra Klein, “Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter,” New York Times, April 27, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/opinion/elon-musk-twitter.html.
123 Chris Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 101–107.
124 The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (https://www.csldf.org) offers legal support and educational information to the field and works to ensure that scientists “can conduct, publish, and discuss their research and advocate for science without the threat of political harassment, censorship, or legal intimidation.” For more information, see the fund’s website. Physicians started the group Shots Heard Round the World (https://shotsheard.org) to offer support and collective response to medical professionals targeted by anti-vaccine activists.
125 Renée DiResta, “Virus Experts Aren’t Getting the Message Out,” The Atlantic, May 6, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/health-experts-dont-understand-how-information-moves/611218.
126 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), 263–265.
127 Lauren Kinkade, “5 Good—and Often Funny—Government Social Media Accounts,” Governing, December 4, 2022, https://www.governing.com/community/5-good-and-often-funny-government-social-media-accounts.
128 Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, Analyzing Narrative Reality (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009), 211.
129 Taylor Lorenz, “To Fight Vaccine Lies, Authorities Recruit an ‘Influencer Army,’” New York Times, August 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/01/technology/vaccine-lies-influencer-army.html.
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