Christiane Amanpour had a problem, and in mid-February CNN talker decided to confront her network’s leadership about it. Her frustration boi
by Seth Mandel
Christiane Amanpour had a problem, and in mid-February CNN talker decided to confront her network’s leadership about it. Her frustration boiled down to the fact that CNN was carefully running its Gaza coverage through its Jerusalem bureau’s fact checkers, which has always included Arab staff based outside of Israel as well. The stakes were too high, and the famous Hamas censorship and propaganda networks too powerful, for CNN to do what many newspapers were doing: run with copy straight from Hamas to print.
The results had thus far been undeniable: CNN anchors like Jake Tapper, Bianna Golodryga, and Abby Phillip were turning in thoughtful, deeply considered segments while holding politicians’ feet to the fire. Because of the plain facts of the war, Hamas’s depraved modus operandi was exposed for all to see. That’s when Amanpour went to management to demand a change.
Well, it’s pretty clear Amanpour’s strongarming worked. Here she is this week leading a sloppy segment playing up an already-debunked piece of Hamas propaganda. Anyone can get fooled by a video, of course—but that was the point of the fact checkers so reviled by Amanpour. This particular hoax was easy to spot: The “mass grave” in Khan Younis—to which Amanpour devotes a “difficult to watch” segment—was dug by Palestinians. After watching the story get notice from other journalists and even members of Congress, it became clear what this was: a real, live, actual disinformation campaign.
Perfect timing, then, for the return of Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz, you’ll remember, was briefly put at the helm of a Biden administration censorship project dressed up as a “disinformation” board. It immediately became clear that this was the worst idea on the planet: Jankowicz had actually been fooled by disinformation campaigns and even arguably joined one—the attempt by national-security officials to declare Hunter Biden’s very real laptop a Russian trick. As Robby Soave points out, this particular story has had debilitating consequences for free speech and for the institutional legitimacy of national-security and intelligence officials: “Not only were so many so-called experts dead wrong about the Russian connection, they pursued all the wrong policies as a result. Vast efforts to pressure social media platforms to censor questionable content were what followed. Crackdowns by the FBI, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies on election-related information paved the way for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to crack down on coronavirus-related misinformation. This isn’t an insignificant or trivial issue that Jankowicz just happened to get wrong. It was emblematic of an entire approach to dealing with disputed facts—an approach pioneered by academics working in tandem with government agencies and directed at speech on social media.”
Experts in online disinformation say that it goes beyond trolling — it's part of an effort to undermine women's participation in democracy.
Barbara Rodriguez at The 19th:
Vice President Kamala Harris has long been the target of racist and misogynistic attacks online as a woman in politics who is also Black and South Asian. As she seeks the Democratic nomination for president, the gendered, sexualized and racial disinformation against her could get worse — and experts warn there may be less comprehensive oversight by tech companies to stop its spread this election cycle.
In the days since President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed Harris to be his successor, right-wing media personalities and others have posted disinformation and misinformation — intentional and unintentional spreading of false information, respectively — about Harris in memes, videos and writings online.
The posts, shared on popular social media platforms, have primarily focused on sexualized and racist narratives about Harris, including claims about her dating history and her eligibility to be president. Disinformation experts who spoke with The 19th said highlighting or linking to more specific disinformation about Harris risks amplifying it.
Nina Jankowicz, cofounder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, an organization that tracks how deceptive information is spread and its threats to democracy, believes the tech companies that run these popular platforms are not doing enough to stop the spread of disinformation about women candidates like Harris. She noted that some social media moderation systems can miss detecting posts being shared right now about Harris in part because the problematic messages are often coded to hide their meaning.
“People have free speech. People can be critical of people in politics, whether they’re men or women. But what we’re talking about here are posts that go against the platforms’ own terms of service — in terms of violent rhetoric, in terms of sexualized rhetoric, in terms of gender-based or ethnicity-based or race-based harassment,” she said.
Tech companies that run social media platforms have made some public commitments to address disinformation generated by artificial intelligence in election-related content. They’ve also faced scrutiny on the scope of their efforts on overall content moderation.
[...]
Jankowicz, herself the target of disinformation, is the coauthor of a study conducted in 2020 and released in early 2021 that analyzed gendered abuse of women candidates. The analysis looked at 13 women across six social media platforms and more than 336,000 pieces of abusive content shared by over 190,000 users over a two-month period. Harris accounted for 78 percent of the total recorded instances of gendered abuse and disinformation.
“Unfortunately, Harris has been targeted with these as long as she’s been in politics. The internet makes them more potent,” added Jankowicz, who wrote “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back,” published in 2022. “These narratives exist and they are being used in a coordinated way in order to undermine the idea that she is fit for office.”
Smith said there’s power in the general public being aware of the intention here.
“They’re not trolling her just to troll her. There’s a broader effort at play that is connected to undermining women’s participation in democracy and women holding office,” she said. “There is this bigger agenda.”
Former President Donald Trump claimed ahead of his party’s convention this month that he would try to share a message of unity to potential voters, though his words and policy proposals have been rife with animosity toward immigrants and transgender people. He has also repeatedly criticized Harris — and not just over differences in policy positions. In early July, he posted on his Truth Social account a veiled reference to Harris’ dating history on a social media post as a means of tying it to her professional ascension.
On that same platform, Trump this week called the vice president — who is also a former U.S. senator, attorney general and district attorney — “dumb as a rock.” Trump has also tried to make fun of Harris’ laugh, which his campaign included in a memo released about her record in public office. The laughter also closes the first attack ad by a pro-Trump political action committee, released this week.
“That focus on style over substance is an attempt to diminish beliefs that she is ‘presidential,’” Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University and the director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), said during a call Tuesday with reporters. “All of these attacks and the degree to which they resonate reflect the persistent dominance of masculinity and Whiteness in presidential politics, and we see candidates and campaigns double down on these status quo dynamics in messaging and presentation.”
Some politicians used racist tropes to claim Harris was unqualified to run for president. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, said on Monday on social media and during a CNN interview that Harris was tapped as vice president through DEI — which stands for “diversity, equity and inclusion” but has been coopted by detractors as a racist message about a person’s qualifications for a job. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made a similar claim on Tuesday on social media. Politico reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson has instructed Republicans to stick to messaging about Harris’ policies instead of her gender and race.
It’s not just mainstream online platforms where racist and sexist messaging is running rampant. In the first 48 hours after Harris announced her intention to run for arguably the most powerful job in the world, hate speech about her rose sharply on websites where users are known to share right-wing conspiracies, according to an analysis by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an organization that has been tracking how political discourse is shaping the potential for political violence.
“Women politicians, particularly women of color, have long experienced harassment, misogyny, and racism, sometimes to the point of being driven out of politics,” Wendy Via, a cofounder of the project, said in a statement to The 19th. “What is shameful is that this kind of vile rhetoric in our political discourse is completely unsurprising at this point. We can’t allow ourselves to become numb to the dehumanization of women, especially as we’re being used as pawns in a political power grab and the undermining of democracy.”
Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win a party’s nomination for president, talked about her own experiences in facing “sexism and double standards” in an opinion piece Tuesday, where she also spoke of the attacks she endured when she ran for president and the realities that Harris will face in the weeks ahead: “She and the campaign will have to cut through the noise, and all of us as voters must be thoughtful about what we read, believe and share.”
With Kamala Harris running for President, the racist and sexist disinformation attacks against Harris are back in full force.
These folks are scared of a powerful woman potentially becoming the next President, so these folks resort to degrading gender and race-based attacks on Harris.
Well, folks, here we are again, watching our elected officials trip over their tongues and grasp at the most disastrous of historical references as if they were pulling the best card from a stacked deck. This time, it’s Texas Republican Representative Keith Self, who recently decided to channel his inner schoolyard bully by quoting none other than Joseph Goebbels—the Nazi propaganda minister…
So, um, you have committed, like, disinformation and stuff, so we’re going to have to send you to Gitmo?! Like, soooo crazy, right?!
More seriously, here’s Katherine Dee, looking past superficial cultural signifiers to arrive at the right comparison:
As a class, Jankowicz included, “disinformation experts” feel curiously similar to Bush-era Islamism “experts.” They come with impressively long lists of credentials that upon closer inspection seem to amount to little more than: “I’ve spent years promoting the pre-packaged, state-sponsored narratives about how X is a threat to democracy.”
This analysis contextualizes the recent debate about whether or not the left has gone more left or the right more right over the last two decades. The increasingly unstable governing consensus does not consider itself wedded for life to the left or the right—in the American culture war sense of liberal vs. conservative—nor does its fractious opposition stay in one place. These tendencies have chased each other all around the political compass since 9/11, contingent upon shifting affiliations with different wings of civil society, each side allying from time to time now with the cultural right, now with the cultural left. Meanwhile, the security experts behind the scenes inflame the public with paranoia and scapegoating—hate the Muslims! hate the Russians! hate the white males!—because in a classic case of projection they are the socially destabilizing disinfo agents and propagandists they claim to revile.
Cultural loyalties aside, I am politically pro-free-speech and anti-war before I am right or left, and therefore unconquerably suspicious of state information bureaucracies, which may be able to co-exist with whatever they mean when they say “our democracy,” but not with anything a normal person would call democratic. You may think Orwell is “cringe” and a “meme,” and I don’t always agree with him or find him the most relevant authority either. But as would-be sophisticates, we often recoil from him only because he went to the thankless and unglamorous trouble of stating the obvious:
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between authoritarians and libertarians.
