"Truth Cops": WMF may have attended DHS disinfo meetings since 2018

[Jimbo Jambo]

The Intercept

Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives.

Wouldn't make sense to restrict it to office actions (an insignificant share of the whole.)
So which admins, which editors, and what should we call the new user group?

[Midsize Jake]

Well now, that's certainly a misleading thread title. We'll definitely be changing that, but... you do realize that these meetings started in 2018, during the Trump Administration, when the definition of "election disinformation" coming from the Executive Branch was the opposite of what it is now, right?

That's not to say the WMF (or whoever was attending the meetin's on their behalf) weren't lying their asses off about what people were posting on Wikipedia and what they were (not) doing about it. All those companies were, though — they all have one agenda, which amounts to "don't curb our unfair advantages by changing Section 230 or requiring real-name authentication on social media." To ask them to "police themselves" is moronic.

It was (and to some extent still is) about a million times easier and a billion times cheaper to just lie to the idiots in charge and tell them "everything is fine" than to actually "police themselves" in any meaningful way, as I'm sure we all recall quite vividly.

[Jimbo Jambo]

you do realize that these meetings started in 2018, during the Trump Administration

You changed the title because you thought "ahead of the 2020 election" implied Biden?

[iii]

The question I have is what maven figured out the meetings were about "disinfo"? My impression is that this is a retcon explanation for the meetings since the mismanaged launch of the "Disinformation Board" is something The Intercept seems to love to hate a lot.

[Jim]

The question I have is what maven figured out the meetings were "disinfo"?

Well, according to the link on "The Intercept"'s homepage, that would be "the feds"...

Under the guise of counterterrorism, the government is accelerating pressure on social media companies to crack down on speech the feds deem disinformation.

[MrErnie]

The initiatives were set up with the intent to monitor election related disinformation (by foreign governments). Under Biden's administration, the focus shifted to general disinformation (including domestic sources).

[iii]

The initiatives were set up with the intent to monitor election related disinformation (by foreign governments). Under Biden's administration, the focus shifted to general disinformation (including domestic sources).

How does anyone know when a source is foreign government sponsored versus domestically homebrewed?

If I were a foreign government hoping to destabilize another country, I can think of no better thing to do than encourage homebrewed conspiracy theories about how vaccines against a pandemic-causing virus should be refused, that elections are all rigged, and that 50% of your fellow citizens are devil-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles. How does anyone know the provenance? And why can't we have both?

[Jim]

And why can't we have both?

[owl be it]

The initiatives were set up with the intent to monitor election related disinformation (by foreign governments). Under Biden's administration, the focus shifted to general disinformation (including domestic sources).

How does anyone know when a source is foreign government sponsored versus domestically homebrewed?

If I were a foreign government hoping to destabilize another country, I can think of no better thing to do than encourage homebrewed conspiracy theories about how vaccines against a pandemic-causing virus should be refused, that elections are all rigged, and that 50% of your fellow citizens are devil-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles. How does anyone know the provenance? And why can't we have both?

Or indeed, to flummox them into a panic about rooting out subversives, like Stalin's purges which rid the USSR of much of its intellectual talent.

[MrErnie]

When people complained about companies censoring speech as running afoul of the 1st amendment, scolds would screech that the 1st amendment only applies to government actions. But in this situation, if the government is pressuring / encouraging the private companies to act, isn't there then a real claim about 1st amendment issues?

[iii]

When people complained about companies censoring speech as running afoul of the 1st amendment, scolds would screech that the 1st amendment only applies to government actions. But in this situation, if the government is pressuring / encouraging the private companies to act, isn't there then a real claim about 1st amendment issues?

You cannot be serious. The US government pressures/encourages actions all the time. Do you think that every regulatory action it does is an abrogation of free speech? When the government puts out a PSA warning of the dangers of this or that, is that a violation of the First Amendment?

What kind of woolly thinking is this?

[owl be it]

When people complained about companies censoring speech as running afoul of the 1st amendment, scolds would screech that the 1st amendment only applies to government actions. But in this situation, if the government is pressuring / encouraging the private companies to act, isn't there then a real claim about 1st amendment issues?

You cannot be serious. The US government pressures/encourages actions all the time. Do you think that every regulatory action it does is an abrogation of free speech? When the government puts out a PSA warning of the dangers of this or that, is that a violation of the First Amendment?

What kind of woolly thinking is this?

If they show a PSA on a TV station, it is one thing. If the Department of Preventing Harmful Narratives is having closed-door meetings with the TV station's executives to "suggest" what they should cover on the news, it is another thing.

[iii]

When people complained about companies censoring speech as running afoul of the 1st amendment, scolds would screech that the 1st amendment only applies to government actions. But in this situation, if the government is pressuring / encouraging the private companies to act, isn't there then a real claim about 1st amendment issues?

You cannot be serious. The US government pressures/encourages actions all the time. Do you think that every regulatory action it does is an abrogation of free speech? When the government puts out a PSA warning of the dangers of this or that, is that a violation of the First Amendment?

What kind of woolly thinking is this?

If they show a PSA on a TV station, it is one thing. If the Department of Preventing Harmful Narratives is having closed-door meetings with the TV station's executives to "suggest" what they should cover on the news, it is another thing.

A PSA is nearly compelled speech! A meeting with executives that carries no weight of law or regulation is somehow worse? Or are you just afraid that this is what happened behind closed doors? You think the DHS slammed the coffee cup down and said, "FACEBOOK! WE'RE WATCHING YOU!"

[MrErnie]

Apparently the ACLU is also concerned about this, tweeting yesterday "The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere. Our government can't use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights." Woolly thinking, indeed, I guess. There is an actual issue here.

[MrErnie]

When people complained about companies censoring speech as running afoul of the 1st amendment, scolds would screech that the 1st amendment only applies to government actions. But in this situation, if the government is pressuring / encouraging the private companies to act, isn't there then a real claim about 1st amendment issues?

You cannot be serious. The US government pressures/encourages actions all the time. Do you think that every regulatory action it does is an abrogation of free speech? When the government puts out a PSA warning of the dangers of this or that, is that a violation of the First Amendment?

What kind of woolly thinking is this?

If they show a PSA on a TV station, it is one thing. If the Department of Preventing Harmful Narratives is having closed-door meetings with the TV station's executives to "suggest" what they should cover on the news, it is another thing.

The article linked in the OP tells you exactly what the government officials were doing.

[iii]

Apparently the ACLU is also concerned about this, tweeting yesterday "The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere. Our government can't use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights." Woolly thinking, indeed, I guess. There is an actual issue here.

Yeah, the ACLU is making a point that may have no real consequences. Notice they aren't suing anybody.

As a matter of law, there are any of a half dozen tests to see if the First Amendment prevents government action. I can think of at least two (compelling state interest, clear and present danger) that are liable to be invoked here as legitimate tests.

Now maybe you think those two tests are ridiculous, but I don't think the ACLU is arguing for throwing those out yet. But who knows in today's world?

[iii]

When people complained about companies censoring speech as running afoul of the 1st amendment, scolds would screech that the 1st amendment only applies to government actions. But in this situation, if the government is pressuring / encouraging the private companies to act, isn't there then a real claim about 1st amendment issues?

You cannot be serious. The US government pressures/encourages actions all the time. Do you think that every regulatory action it does is an abrogation of free speech? When the government puts out a PSA warning of the dangers of this or that, is that a violation of the First Amendment?

What kind of woolly thinking is this?

If they show a PSA on a TV station, it is one thing. If the Department of Preventing Harmful Narratives is having closed-door meetings with the TV station's executives to "suggest" what they should cover on the news, it is another thing.

The article linked in the OP tells you exactly what the government officials were doing.

Actually, the leaked minutes do. I don't see a lot of strong arm tactics there. Maybe a bit of singling out certain trends and so forth.

Let's see if the ACLU files a friend of the court brief to back up Eric Schmitt's theatrics.

[Midsize Jake]

Three weeks have passed and Elon Musk has nearly destroyed taken over Twitter, leading to an uptick in conspiratorialism there. So our own Stephen "The Stubborn WPO Lurker" Harrison has done an article in Slate about this:

No, Wikipedia Is Not Colluding With DHS
By Stephen Harrison • Nov 21, 2022

It starts out with a flat denial, just in case anyone actually believed that the US Federal government was controlling Wikipedia at or near election-time (emphasis his):

But is there any substance to the claim that the feds have been deciding what information should be published on Wikipedia and other sites? There is not. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick rightfully argued, the Intercept’s story about the U.S. government arbitrating disinformation on tech platforms like Wikipedia is “absolute garbage” and “bullshit reporting.”

I’ll add one more criticism to the list: The false framing is insulting, especially to the volunteer Wikipedia editors who do the hard work of curating reliable information for the site. Because the Wikipedians are not controlled by Uncle Sam.

Pointing out the fact that the false framing is "insulting" seems almost naive in a way, as though he thinks our right-wing friends are singling out Wikipedia for this sort of conspiracy-mongering treatment rather than insulting literally every unconditioned human being on Earth with it on a near-daily basis. And for some reason, Mr. Harrison then goes into a fairly detailed description of the various means by which various disinfo-spreading accounts are dealt with by the admins ("Summit" = User:Girth Summit (T-C-L)):

Once a disruptive user engages in a series of unhelpful contributions to Wikipedia, like edit warring on a page to reinsert their preferred version, the site’s volunteer administrators will move to block that username. But people who have been blocked on Wikipedia often create alternate usernames—so-called sockpuppet accounts—in order to bypass that block. “Editors who have dealt with them [sockpuppets] before often spot behavioral tells—a particular set of articles they’re interested in perhaps, an esoteric viewpoint, certain quirks in their use of the English language; even just things like the times of day when they are editing can sometimes be useful indicators,” Summit said.

Once enough evidence has been gathered in a sockpuppet investigation, a small group of trusted Wikipedia volunteers called checkusers have the ability to determine the IP address for an account. By looking up the IP address, the checkuser can reveal that the puppet master is behind a new crop of dummy accounts—and proceed to block those, too.

Most readers probably won't get past the first few sentences of all that, but I guess the question is... if they do, will they be more impressed with Wikipedia's capacity for controlling disinformation, or less?

It seems to me that if the integrity of The World's Biggest Free Info Resource depends on the ability of a handful of unpaid, anonymous admins to spot "behavioral tells" on an ongoing basis, that's actually not all that great. Even if — for the time being, at least — it seems to work most of the time.

The Comments section suggests that most Slate readers weren't even aware of the "DHS Leaks" story to begin with, so that's no help.

[iii]

It seems to me that if the integrity of The World's Biggest Free Info Resource depends on the ability of a handful of unpaid, anonymous admins to spot "behavioral tells" on an ongoing basis, that's actually not all that great. Even if — for the time being, at least — it seems to work most of the time.

That Wikipedia's free-for-all system seems to be doing a better job than just about every other Web 2.0 outfit does not strike me as an endorsement but rather more a lament.