Little Miss Information

Renée DiResta Isn't A CIA Operative, But Michael Shellenberger Says She Is. Guess Whose Definition Of The Truth Won?

Spy vs. Spy vs. Censorship vs. Stanford

I used to think that the worst impact of disinformation was on the brains of the disinformed. Foreign adversaries lying in order to the deceive the American public is bad; I can’t think of good reasons why we shouldn’t stop it, or at least label the source of the lies. But then I began to see so many many examples of the mislabeling of disinformation that my beliefs were shaken. I came to conclude that the real worst thing about disinformation is that it is how often the charge is used to discredit information one side simply doesn’t like.

But that doesn’t mean that if reasonable steps, ideally not including government intervention, could be taken to label lies as lies it would not benefit us all, or at least those of us not on the Russian payroll. Democracy benefits if social media users know the actual origin of the tweets or arguments they were looking at. Is it truly “free speech” to trick a user into thinking that an account generated in Russia from a Russian advancing Russian interests is actually a Texan concerned about his community ? So there’s the tension. Disinformation is somewhat of a scourge , but the concerns about disinformation can be a bit of a bogie man. In this regard disinformation is a little like the mafia, child pedophilia rings, or Mike Lindell.

I’ve done a lot of reporting on the use of disinformation as a cudgel to silence those we disagree with. It’s such a potent tool I’m very wary of allowing the government to wield it. However, in the cases of purposeful lies used to influence opinions and elections, exposing the actual sources of those arguments to sunlight is the best policy. It would be good to have known in 2016 that the dueling Facebook accounts which egged on two rival groups of angry protesters, to face off against each other on the streets of Houston were each controlled by the same group of Russian agents. Facebook even agrees, now that the Republicans and Democrats running the Senate Intelligence committee threw the information in their face.

Non-CIA Renée

That was just one example in a new book by Renée DiResta Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. On the book’s flap and Amazon page DiResta is identified as “the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory”. That turns out to be misinformation. Stanford closed down the Internet Observatory, or at least the non-child endangerment parts of the observatory, mostly because of a successful campaign to discredit DiResta as being a disinformation misinformer and a CIA asset. That last part is not a joke. Because DiResta interned for the CIA in college, her loudest and most impactful critic, Michael Shellenberger has suggested over and over and over again that she is a CIA asset, without offering any proof to back up his innuendo. But the branding stuck, and now DiResta is out of a job and her research institution has retreated.

My research has led me to conclude that the charge is an order of magnitude more irresponsible than any of DiResta’s supposed misdeeds. I cemented my impressions after interviewing DiResta for The Gist, reading her book, reading accounts of neutral parties, and delving into, as best I could, the “case” against her. Shellenberger, and fellow reporter Matt Taibbi, who is also a DiResta critic, but not nearly as conspiratorially driven as Shellenberger, have written extensively about her, constantly emphasizing her supposed CIA affiliation and testifying in front of congress about the research she conducted at Stanford.

Because Taibbi writes lengthily and behind paywalls, and since Shellenberger does the same with an added patina of confusing and sometimes contradictory innuendo, I struggled to find a succinct précis against DiResta. Ideally I could get my head around the actual charges, via a handy, 10 to 20 bullet point accounting of actual examples of DiResta and the Stanford Internet Observatory attempting to shut down accurate information about elections.

Some “Disinformation” Deserves Dissing

We all know, or should know, that the Hunter Biden laptop story turned out to be true. There have been many cases of accurate information being dismissed as misinformation, of the charge of disinformation being misapplied, and especially of journalists paid to uncover supposed misinformation using their platforms to engage in inaccuracies and partisanship. But none of that describes Rene DiResta. There is no easily accessed case against her, no series of her flagging election lies which turned out to be true, no acts of censoring factual political speech. This is because she never did any of that.

My quest for a pithy, clearly-made case with actually examples led me to a report from House Republicans titled “The Weaponization of “Disinformation” Pseudo-experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech.”

This report contains 13 screen shots of tweets or posts that the House Republicans allege researchers like DiResta flagged to Twitter or Facebook as violating their own rules elections. Of these 13 examples of the so-called censoring of election-related speech, a single tweet by Republican Senator Thom Tillis turned out to be accurate, though not at the time it was posted. The tweet claimed victory on election night, even though Tillis’ North Carolina senate race was still within 100,000 votes out of 5 million cast. Three days later, when counties actually certified their votes, his declaration of a victory proved true.

I would say that falls within the bounds of normal electoral puffery, as does a Newt Gingrich tweet, grousing about supposed Democratic voter suppression.

Inaccurate though the tweet was, it should not have been censored, certainly not by the government. Thankfully, it wasn’t. It was flagged by Stanford researchers to Twitter so that the post could “be labeled with labels clarifying that vote by mail is secure.” Twitter declined to do so. When I raised the idea to DiResta that the Gingrich and Tillis tweets, though not technically true at the time of posting, or at all, should be seen as falling within the normal bounds of political speech she told me that I was probably correct, but emphasized that her researchers weren’t asking Twitter to take down tweets, just to label questionable statements as questionable. She also said that it was a point of emphasis among the the social media sites themselves to warn users of premature election results (this was the widespread concern, called the red-mirage, about the possibility of day-of results being held up as final totals).

Free Speech or Confirmed Lies?

The report’s other examples of tweets that were the subject of unfair censorship attempts include White House Spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany’s inaccurate assertions about Pennsylvania ballots :

President Trump’s passing along inaccuracies about election software:

And Donald Trump Jr. calling for investigations based on the inaccuracies, of right wing propagandist James O’Keefe:

A rebuttal to the charge of disinformation needs to include some proof that the content is actually accurate. But none of these tweets were. Nor were a serious of tweets which the House committee objected to as an “effort to Censor Humor and Satire”. They included a Twitter user claiming that boxes of “Emergency” Democrat votes were found the morning after election day. The claim was serious, though not true, even if the accompanying picture was meant as a joke. The House Judiciary Subcommittee still screen-shotted the tweet in their report as an example of unfair censorship :

Is it hall-monitory to include the disclaimer at the top of the tweet? The picture is a joke, that’s true, but the claims of votes being found are a lie. Reasonable people can differ on how Twitter should address this, what’s not in dispute is that the word “censorship” does not rightly apply to requesting a label during a period of widespread misleading rumormongering. I doubt the label will change minds, but it’s not censorship.

Then there’s this, which the committee Republicans included as another example of Rene DiResta and those of her ilk supposedly censoring information that isn’t really disinformation:

They weren’t planning a scam. Candace Owens wasn’t prevented from claiming there was a scam. Her claim was labeled as possibly misleading, because it was, in fact, misleading.

This is the evidence that Rene DiResta and friends censored political speech over the election.

Shellenberger Smears

Mix weak claims of censorship with the spooky charge of a CIA affiliation and a scalp has been claimed. In the name of advancing truth Shellenberger deployed smears and innuendo to take down an opponent. I am such a staunch believer in free speech because listening to arguments and counter-arguments is the best way to avoid inaccuracies that leads us astray through diversion and propaganda. But inaccuracy, diversion and propaganda were the exact tools that Shellenberger used to silence his rival.

In the name of free speech Shellenberger pointed to Exhibit A: an ongoing CIA operation thats unproven because it’s unprovable, because it’s untrue. And then there was Exhibit B: nothing. No list, no particulars, an example-free government report (I could call it a shadowy government report if you’re the kind of person for whom such descriptions confer credibility).

We’re being asked to determine what is truth, what are lies and what is truth mislabeled as lies. A figure in this fight uses dark hints and suggestions that we’re all being secretly victimized by a covert CIA operative, and somehow HE is the guy holding the mantle of truth teller? No. Rene DiResta got done dirty by the House Republicans, by Michael Shellenberger, and by her former employer Stanford for kowtowing to the pressure of scaremongering. No great blows for truth have been dealt, just a sorry setback for one institution that should know better and one media figure who has badly shamed himself along the way.