stephen miller – Techdirt (original) (raw)

The Disinformation Campaign That Has Effectively Destroyed The Ability To Combat Disinformation

from the disinfo-about-disinfo dept

We already covered the oral arguments in the Murthy v. Missouri case earlier this week, showing that the Supreme Court appears to be quite skeptical of the arguments by the states regarding the federal government “jawboning” to convince social media to take down certain content. For months now, we’ve been pointing out that the factual record in that case is a mess, driven by conspiracy theorists pushing nonsense. Unfortunately, a few Judges both believed the nonsense and then when they couldn’t rely on it to make their point had to misquote people, quote things out of context, or entirely fabricate parts of quotes in their rulings.

What became abundantly clear in the oral arguments Monday was that multiple justices, including Trump-appointed ones, found the factual record to be suspect and problematic. The crux of the case was effectively (1) the White House made a few public statements in which they were angry about how social media moderated, (2) the companies regularly met with government agencies about a variety of things (cybersecurity, COVID misinformation, election integrity), and (3) therefore we can assume that any content moderation that occurred on the platforms was at the government’s command.

It was a weak argument, and multiple justices pointed out how tenuous the connection was between the government and the actions of the companies.

Over the last few months, we’ve pointed out a few times how this and some related campaigns have been weaponized by proxies to try to stifle any effort to respond to (not block!) disinformation campaigns and election interference, including the misleading publication of “The Twitter Files,” by pretend journalists who didn’t understand what they were looking at (nor bother to speak to any experts who might have explained it to them).

The media is slowly, but surely, putting the underlying story together of how a bunch of nonsense peddlers concocted a full blown conspiracy theory full of disinformation, all targeted at destroying the ability of disinformation researchers to counter disinformation by attacking them as censors. Last September, the Washington Post had a big story on this:

Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.

The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.

In November, NBC had a big story that went a bit further in highlighting how this effort had basically killed off perfectly reasonable information sharing (of the nature that Justices Kagan and Kavanaugh noted happen all the time in government).

The most recent setback came when the FBI put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian and Chinese influence campaigns. Employees at two U.S. tech companies who used to receive regular briefings from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force told NBC News that it has been months since the bureau reached out.

And, just before the Murthy hearing, the NY Times put out a big piece tying together some of the loose ends about all this, and detailing the nature of the campaign. The whole effort was, in short, a made up conspiracy theory by a group of operatives seeking to kneecap any research into disinformation or how to counter it, perhaps recognizing how such efforts would harm Donald Trump. As the article notes, much of it seems to have been orchestrated by Trump advisor Stephen Miller:

The counteroffensive was led by former Trump aides and allies who had also pushed to overturn the 2020 election. They include Stephen Miller, the White House policy adviser; the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans; and lawmakers in Congress like Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who since last year has led a House subcommittee to investigate what it calls “the weaponization of government.”

Those involved draw financial support from conservative donors who have backed groups that promoted lies about voting in 2020. They have worked alongside an eclectic cast of characters, including Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter and vowed to make it a bastion of free speech, and Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official who previously produced content for a social media account that trafficked in posts about “white ethnic displacement.” (More recently, Mr. Benz originated the false assertion that Taylor Swift was a “psychological operation” asset for the Pentagon.)

Benz is a bizarre character. As an anonymous troll online, he pushed blatantly bigoted nonsense about the “great replacement theory” and “white genocide.” Now he presents himself as a former State Department official and a cybersecurity expert. His name shows up repeatedly in all of this, including in efforts by Jim Jordan to attack disinformation research. The reality was that he was a low-level speechwriter in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who then helped Stephen Miller as a speechwriter, and only joined the State Department in November of 2020 after Trump lost the election.

It was only then that he suddenly remade himself as a “cyber expert,” despite having no real qualifications or experience in the space. And he continued to leverage that brief couple of months in the State Department to suggest he has some sort of deep knowledge or expertise of government censorship. The NY Times notes how Benz’s conspiracy theory nonsense (in which he’s either never actually understood, or deliberately misunderstands, the nature of disinformation research) became the fuel that powered both the Missouri case and Jim Jordan’s weaponization committee:

In late November 2020, Mr. Benz was abruptly moved to the State Department as a deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy. It is unclear precisely what he did in the role. Mr. Benz has since claimed that the job, which he held for less than two months, gave him his expertise in cyberpolicy.

Mr. Benz’s report gained national attention when a conservative website, Just the News, wrote about it in September 2022. Four days later, Mr. Schmitt’s office sent requests for records to the University of Washington and others demanding information about their contacts with the government.

Mr. Schmitt soon amended his lawsuit to include nearly five pages detailing Mr. Benz’s work and asserting a new, broader claim: Not only was the government exerting pressure on the platforms, but it was also effectively deputizing the private researchers “to evade First Amendment and other legal restrictions.”

Benz was also one of the originators of the bogus “22 million tweets” claims that completely tripped up Matt Taibbi (the number was how many tweets the Election Integrity Partnership reviewed as discussing the mis- and disinfo topics they covered after the election, and had nothing to do with how many tweets the EIP reported to Twitter: just a few thousand). As the NY Times details, Taibbi’s partner in the Twitter Files, Mike Shellenberger, credits Benz with helping him understand what he had “uncovered” with the Twitter Files:

In March 2023, Mr. Benz joined the fray. Both Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Benz participated in a live discussion on Twitter, which was co-hosted by Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, an organizer of the Trump rally that preceded the riot on Jan. 6.

As Mr. Taibbi described his work, Mr. Benz jumped in: “I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle.”

There was a far broader “scale of censorship the world has never experienced before,” he told Mr. Taibbi, who made plans to follow up.

Later, Mr. Shellenberger said that connecting with Mr. Benz had led to “a big aha moment.”

“The clouds parted, and the sunlight burst through the sky,” he said on a podcast. “It’s like, oh, my gosh, this guy is way, way farther down the rabbit hole than we even knew the rabbit hole went.”

As we’ve detailed, Taibbi and Shellenberger never seemed to understand what they were looking at and flailed around embarrassingly for months. They needed help from someone who actually understood stuff to pull together the pieces (which would have shown the mostly boring, ho-hum nature of what Twitter’s trust & safety team was actually doing). Instead, they got suckered in by a nonsense-peddling conspiracy theorist who told a story that played right into the confirmation bias they needed to convince themselves that they had been gifted a huge story of government censorship (which is just not supported by any of the evidence).

The Times report also suggests that Jim Jordan’s “Weaponization” subcommittee appears to have leaked private deposition information to Stephen Miller to help him file even more sketchy lawsuits.

Mr. Miller followed with his own federal lawsuit on behalf of private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, filing with D. John Sauer, the former solicitor general of Missouri who had led that case. (More recently, Mr. Sauer has represented Mr. Trump at the Supreme Court.)

Democrats in the House and legal experts questioned the collaboration as potentially unethical. Lawyers involved in the case have claimed that the subcommittee leaked selective parts of interviews conducted behind closed doors to America First Legal for use in its private lawsuits.

An amicus brief filed by the committee misrepresented facts and omitted evidence in ways that may have violated the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York wrote in a 46-page letter to Mr. Jordan.

However, all of this adds up to a pretty straightforward path: a bunch of Trumpist operatives in the form of Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, Mike Benz and some others have plotted out a nonsense conspiracy theory — either deliberately or by simply misunderstanding what they were looking at — to present an entirely fictional story of a “censorship industrial complex,” and the only real purpose of this effort is to kneecap researchers and experts in disinformation from studying how disinformation flows and how to best counter it.

The organizations involved in the Election Integrity Partnership faced an avalanche of requests and, if they balked, subpoenas for any emails, text messages or other information involving the government or social media companies dating to 2015.

Complying consumed time and money. The threat of legal action dried up funding from donors — which had included philanthropies, corporations and the government — and struck fear in researchers worried about facing legal action and political threats online for the work.

“You had a lot of organizations doing this research,” a senior analyst at one of them said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of fear of legal retribution. “Now, there are none.”

Having watched all of this play out over the past two years, and feeling like I was yelling into the wind about it (especially as someone who has actually spent years calling out actual attempts by the government to censor content), it was at least comforting to see multiple Justices (mainly Kavanaugh, Barrett, Sotomayor and Kagan) see through all of this and recognize the emptiness at the heart of the Murthy lawsuit, which almost entirely consists of sand being deliberately thrown around by a bunch of bullshit peddlers.

Filed Under: cisa, disinformation, disinformation research, eip, jim jordan, mike benz, murthy v. missouri, research, stephen miller

CBP Branch Retweets Disgraced, Bigoted Trump Advisor, Gets Account Locked Down By CBP Commissioner

from the this-is-the-part-where-we-remove-our-masks dept

Government officials may say acceptable things when pressed for comment by journalists, oversight, and members of the public. But if you really want to know what an agency thinks, just keep your eye on the rank-and-file.

So, when the West Texas branch of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) started retweeting one of the Trump administration’s resident bigots, it showed nothing but CBP West Texas’ entire ass.

Let’s take a brief moment to reacquaint ourselves with Stephen Miller, the man who became the breathy, white voice in Trump’s spray-tanned ear when it came to immigration policy.

Stephen Miller has been subpoenaed by the January 6th committee, which is still trying to determine who in the government assisted in the attempted undermining of the election certification following Trump’s loss at the polls.

Miller started out as the “national policy director” for Trump’s 2016 “transition team.” Shortly thereafter he became the face of Trump’s increasingly ugly, increasingly xenophobic immigration polices. Let’s review a few of Miller’s greatest hits, recited here in the dry language of a Wikipedia article any dumbass at the CBP west wing could have accessed before retweeting someone whose opinions on immigration mean less now than ever.

In the early days of Trump’s presidency, Miller worked with Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, to enact policies through executive orders to restrict immigration and crack down on sanctuary cities.[53] Miller and Bannon preferred executive orders to legislation.[50] Miller’s and Sessions’s views on immigration were influenced by anti-immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies.[54]

[…]

Miller played an influential role in Trump’s decision to fire FBI director James Comey in May 2017.[56]

[…]

In September 2017, The New York Times reported that Miller stopped the Trump administration from showing the public an internal study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees had a net positive effect on government revenues.[12][13]

[…]

In October 2018, the Financial Times reported that Miller sought to make it impossible for Chinese students to study in the United States. Miller argued that a ban was necessary to reduce Chinese espionage, but that another benefit was that it would hurt elite universities with staff and students critical of Trump.

[…]

Miller also advised Trump not to openly embrace mask-wearing to halt the spread of the coronavirus.[83]

[…]

In November 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center acquired more than 900 emails Miller sent Breitbart News writer Katie McHugh between 2015 and 2016. The emails became the basis for an exposé that showed that Miller had enthusiastically pushed the views of white nationalist publications such as American Renaissance and VDARE, as well as the far-right conspiracy website InfoWars…

This is the person the West Texas CBP office felt worthy of retweets: an affirmed xenophobe who acted as a hype man for Trump’s anti-immigration actions.

The retweets, screenshotted here by Adam Isacson, show exactly what this CBP branch felt was worth amplifying with its official government account — one with nearly 17,000 followers.

If you can’t see the screenshot or read the CBP-amplified Stephen Miller tweets, this is what they say:

Violent criminals lay waste to our communities undisturbed while the immense power of the state is arrayed against those whose only crime is dissent.

_The law has been turned from a shield to protect the innocent into a swo_rd to conquer them.

We’ll take a brief break to applaud the man who turned the law into a sword to punish innocent immigrants while burying evidence of their positive contributions to the American way of life — one who actually claims a government that goes after people who participated in an unprecedented raid of the Capitol building cares less about the public’s safety that one that wielded the “immense power of the state” to persecute browner people just wanting a shot at the American dream.

And here’s another inconvenient fact standing in the way of Miller’s shitposting-but-I’m-serious tweeting: immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than natural-born residents of the United States.

Moving on to the second tweet:

The media’s greatest power is its ability to frame what is a national crisis (eg “cops are racist summer ’20) and what is not: Biden’s eradication of our border means we are no longer a Republic — he’s ended nearly 250 years of constitutional government. The media is silent.

This is the kind of word salad that will only be appreciated by like-minded connoisseurs of this particular type of word salad. The rest of us will consider it as comprehensible as jello salad featuring suspended pasta and Vienna sausages: yes, it may resemble something a person could theoretically consume in extremely dire circumstances, but no one in their right mind would actually consume it voluntarily.

Biden has not “eradicated” the border. (Notably, both Miller and his retweeters have nothing to say about the northern border, which is equally in danger of being “eradicated” by policy changes.) Cops are, in fact, pretty fucking racist.

Fortunately, the CBP has decided this is something that needed to be addressed, rather than ignored. As Axios reports, CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus stepped up to inform the public the agency as a whole did not approve of this rogue action and has seized control of the regional account.

As of the writing of this post, the Twitter account is alive but inactive. The retweets of Stephen Miller have been memory-holed, something that has undoubtedly resulted in dozens of FOIA requests. But when CBP Commissioner Magnus says these tweets “do not reflect the values of this administration,” he’s only partially correct. They obviously reflected the values of the CBP West Texas employees, who decided Miller’s anti-immigration rants were worth amplifying. And that’s a problem he’ll need to address if he expects the nation to believe border enforcement agencies aren’t just playgrounds for bigots.

Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, cbp west texas, stephen miller, texas

Activism & Doxing: Stephen Miller, ICE And How Internet Platforms Have No Good Options

from the and-for-fun,-the-cfaa-and-scraping dept

Last month, at the COMO Content Moderation Summit in Washington DC, I co-ran a “You Make the Call” session with Emma Llanso from CDT. The idea was to turn the audience into a content moderation/trust & safety team of a fictionalized social media platform. We showed numerous examples of content or accounts that were “flagged” and then showed the associated terms of service, and had the entire audience vote on what to do. One of the fictional examples involved someone posting a link to a third-party website “contactinfo.com” claiming to have the personal phone and email contact info of Harvey Weinstein and urging people “you know what to do!” with a hashtag. The relevant terms of service included this: “You may not post personal information about others without their consent.”

The audience voting was pretty mixed on this. 47% of the audience punted on the question, choosing to escalate it to a supervisor as they felt they couldn’t decide whether to leave the content up or take it down. 32% felt it should just be taken down. 10% said to just leave it up and another 10% said to put a content warning flag on the content. We joked a bit during the session that some of these examples were “ripped from the headlines” but apparently we predicted the headlines in this case, because there are two stories this week that touch on exactly this kind of thing.

Example one is the story that came out yesterday, in which Twitter chose to start locking the accounts of users who were either tweeting Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller’s cell phone number, or merely linking to a Splinternews article that published his cell phone number (which I’m guessing has since been changed…).

Splinternews decided to publish Miller’s phone number after multiple news reports attributed the inhumane* decision to separate children of asylum seekers from their parents to Miller, who has defended the plan. Other reports noted that Miller is enjoying all of the controversy over this policy. Splinternews, citing Donald Trump’s own history of giving out the phone numbers of people who anger him, thought it was only fair that people be able to reach out to Miller.

This is — for fairly obvious reasons — a controversial decision. I think most news organizations would never do such a thing. Not surprisingly, the number spread rapidly on Twitter, and Twitter started locking all of those accounts until the tweets were removed. That seems at least well within reason under Twitter’s rules that explicitly state:

You may not publish or post other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission.

But, that question gets a lot sketchier when it comes to locking the accounts of people who merely linked to the Splinternews article. A la our fictionalized example, those people are not actually publishing or posting anyone’s private info. They are posting a link to a third party that purports to have that information. And, of course, in this case, the situation is complicated even more than our fictionalized example because Splinternews is a news organization (owned by Univision), and Twitter also has said that it has a “newsworthy” exception to its rules.

Personally, I think it’s the wrong call to lock the accounts of those linking to the news story, but… as we discovered in our own sample version, it’s not an easy call and lots of people have strong opinions one way or the other. Indeed, part of the reason why Twitter may have decided to do this was that supporters of Trump/Miller started calling out the article as an example of doxxing and claiming that leaving it up showed that Twitter was unfairly biased against them. It is a no win situation.

And, of course, it wouldn’t take long before people started coming up with clever workarounds, such as Parker Higgins (citing the infamous 09F9 controversy in which the MPAA tried to censor the revelation of a cryptographic key that broke the MPAA’s preferred DRM, and people responded by posting variations on the code, including a color chart in which the hex codes of the colors were the code), who posted the following:

Would Twitter lock his account for posting a two color image? At some point, the whole thing gets… crazy. That’s not to argue that revealing someone’s private cell phone number is a good thing — no matter how you feel about Miller or the border policy. But just on the content moderation side, it puts Twitter in a no win situation in which people are going to be pissed off no matter what it does. Oh, and of course, it also helped create something of a Streisand Effect. I certainly hadn’t heard about the Splinternews article or that people were passing around Miller’s phone number until the story broke about Twitter whac’ing at moles on its site.

And that takes us to the second example, which happened a day earlier — and was also in response to people’s quite reasonable* anger about the border policy. Sam Lavigne decided to make something of a public statement about how he felt about ICE by scraping** LinkedIn for profile information on everyone who works at ICE (and who has a LinkedIn public profile). His database included 1595 ICE employees. He wrote a Medium blog post about this, posted the repository to Github and another user, Russel Neiss, created a Twitter account (@iceHRgov) that tweeted out info about each of those employees from that database. Notice that none of those are linked. That’s because all three companies took them down (though you can still find archives of the Medium post). There was also an archive of the Github repository, but it has since been memory-holed as well.

Again… this raises a lot of questions. Github claimed that it removed the page for “violating community guidelines” — specifically around “doxxing and harassment, and violating a third party’s privacy.” Medium claimed that the post violated rules against “doxxing” and specifically the “aggregation of publicly available information to target, shame, blackmail, harass, intimidate, threaten or endanger.” Twitter, in Twitter’s usual way, is not commenting. LinkedIn put out a statement saying: “We do not support or condone what immigration authorities are doing at the border, but we can?t allow the illegal use of our member data. We will take appropriate action to ensure our members? data is protected and used properly.”

Many people point out that all of this feels kind of ridiculous, seeing as this is all public info that the individuals chose to reveal about themselves on a public website. While Medium’s expansive definition of doxxing makes things interesting by including an intent standard in releasing the info, even if it is publicly available, the whole thing, again, demonstrates how complex this is. I know that some people will claim that these are easy calls — but, just for fun, try flipping the equation a bit. If you’re anti-Trump, how would you feel if a prominent alt-right person compiled and posted your info — even if publicly available — on a site where alt-right folks gather, with the clear intent of having hoards of Trump trolls harassing you. Be careful the precedent you set.

If it were up to me, I think I would have come down differently than Medium, Github and Twitter in this case. My rationale: (1) all of this info was public information (2) that those individuals chose to place on a public website, knowing it was public (3) they are all employed by the federal government, meaning they are public servants and (4) while the compilation was done by someone who is clearly against the border policy, Lavigne never encouraged or suggested harassment of ICE agents. Instead, he wrote: “While I don?t have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set, I leave it here with the hope that researchers, journalists and activists will find it useful.” He separately noted that he believed “it’s important to document what’s happening, and by whom.” That seems to actually make a strong point in favor of leaving the data up, as there is value in documenting what’s happening.

That said, reasonable people can disagree on this question (even if there should be no disagreement about how inhumane the policy at the border has been*) of what is the appropriate way for different platforms to handle these situations — taking into account that this situation could play out with very different players in the future, and there is value in being consistent.

This is the very point that we were demonstrating with that game that we ran at COMO. Many people seem to think that content moderation decisions are easy: you just take down the content that is bad, and leave up the content that is good. But it’s pretty rare that the content is easily classified in one of those categories. There is an enormous gray area — and much of it involves nuance and context, which is not always easy to come by — and which may look incredibly different depending on where you sit and what kind of world you think we live in. I still think there are strong arguments that the platforms should have left much of the content discussed in this post up, but I’m not the one making that call.

When we ran that game in DC last month, it was notable that on every single example we used — even the ones we thought were “easy calls” — there were some audience members who selected every option in the game. That is, there was not a single situation in our examples in which everyone agreed what should be done. Indeed, since there were four options, and all four were chosen by at least one person in every single example, it shows just how difficult it really is to make these calls. They are subjective. And what plays into that subjective decision making includes your own views, your own perspective, your own reading of the content and the rules — and sometimes third party factors, including how people are reacting and what public pressure you’re getting (in both directions). It is an impossible situation.

This is also why the various calls to mandate that platforms do this or face legal liability are even more ridiculous and dangerous. There are no “right” answers to these decisions. There are solutions that seem better to lots of people, but plenty of others will disagree. If you think you know the “right” way that all of these questions should be handled, I guarantee you’re wrong, and if you were in charge of these platforms, you’d end up feeling just as conflicted as well.

This is why it’s really time to start thinking about and talking about better solutions. Simply calling on platforms to be the final arbiters of what goes online and what stays offline is not a workable solution.

* Just a side note: if you are among the small minority of ethically-challenged individuals who gets upset that I describe the policy as inhumane: fuck off. The policy is inhumane and if you’re defending it, you should seriously take time to re-evaluate your ethics and your life choices. On a separate note, if you are among the people who are then going to try to justify this policy as “but Obama/others did it too,” the same applies. Whataboutism is no argument here. The policy is inhumane no matter who did it, and pointing out that others did it too doesn’t change that. And, as inhumane as it may have been in the past, it has been severely ramped up. There is no defense for it. Attempting to defend it only serves to out yourself as a horrible person who has issues. Seriously: get help.

** This doesn’t even fit anywhere in with this story, but scraping LinkedIn is (stupidly) incredibly dangerous. Linkedin has a history of suing people for scraping public info off of LinkedIn. And even if it’s lost some of those cases, the company appears to take a pretty aggressive stance towards scrapers. We can argue about how ridiculous this is, but, dammit, this post is already too long talking about other stuff, so discuss it separately.

Filed Under: activism, content moderation, doxing, harassment, ice, internet platforms, phone numbers, stephen miller, takedowns
Companies: github, linkedin, medium, twitter