Taibbi: How An Obama Executive Order Led To The Censorship Industrial Complex

Authored by Ian Schwartz via RealClearPolitics,

At Tuesday’s House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing, Matt Taibbi explained how an Obama executive order led to the Censorship Industrial Complex.

MATT TAIBBI: Mr. Chairman, Madam Ranking Member, thank you. My name is Matt Taibbi, I’m the editor of the Independent Site Racket, and I’ve been covering digital censorship issues since 2018, the fictional ones. On March 14th, 2016, Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13721, Developing a New Integrated Global Engagement Center to Support Government-Wide Counterterrorism Communications Activities Directed Abroad.

It directed the Secretary of State to create a new body, the GEC or GEC, to quote, counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations, including ISIL, Al-Qaeda, and other violent extremists abroad. Seven years later, while working on a story involving internal communications at Twitter, I found myself reading emails between GEC officials and Twitter executives about subjects ranging from COVID-19 to the 2020 election to Donald Trump. Once, Mr. Chairman, you were right to point out that they were once focused abroad, but by this time, GEC officials were largely concerned with domestic English language accounts, people with no ties to terror groups or relationships with adversary nations like Iran, China, or Russia. When I went back this weekend through those documents to find examples of GEC pressuring Twitter to remove or deamplify Americans accused of misinformation, I found an exchange that we Twitter Files reporters missed in 2023. A lawyer at the company asked several other executives if they had any, quote, appetite for writing GEC a letter to ask them to stop going to the media with sensationalist claims about epidemics of foreign bots. One of the company’s senior communications executives gave a remarkably candid answer.

From my chair, it would be very helpful, he wrote. Referencing a well-known Washington reporter, he went on. The pre-briefed Ellen Nakashima article in the Post on Bernie and this coronavirus story, no heads up, are making me worry a little about how good faith these players will be through the press into 2020.

So it wasn’t just conservatives, it was also Bernie Sanders. The date on that email was February 24th, 2020. Three days after the Washington Post ran a devastating feature titled Bernie Sanders briefed by US officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign.

This was an extremely impactful story that opened the floodgates on a conspiracy theory that Sanders was the recipient of Russian help. It claimed bots helping Bernie online were part of, quote, Russia’s broader interest in sowing division in the United States and uncertainty about the validity of American elections. In response to this odd sequel of claims about Russian bots aiding Donald Trump, the company’s head of trust and safety, Yul Roth, gave an unflattering description of GEC’s methods.

Quote, they use Brandwatch to monitor a handful of openly Russian accounts, for instance RT, and an unspecified number of accounts that they baselessly assert are inauthentic. This is the exact formula we previously found behind another often used online tool called Hamilton 68, whose founders were also quoted in the Post piece. Hamilton 68 mixed a smattering of real Russian accounts with a crowd of mostly American, mostly anti-establishment accounts to create a dashboard that synthesized falsely the appearance of Russian social media backing for everything from the Devin Nunes memo to the Parkland shooting.

Although many of the most controversial stories about GEC involved their funding of commercial media scoring operations that downranked conservative news outlets, the GEC also pressured Twitter about left-leaning figures like Sanders, anti-war accounts, libertarians, and independents, as well as conservatives. They managed this by using a trick that gave domestic propaganda the appearance of a counter-terrorist operation. GEC sent out reports that would first identify a few social media accounts with real ties to Russia or China or Iran.

Then it would separately list accounts they called highly connective to that country’s propaganda ecosystem. These would be American or European citizens with inconvenient views. For instance, GEC identified the Twitter accounts of former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and former Italian Democratic Party Secretary Nicola Zingaretti, who was often compared to Bernie, as being highly connective to Russia.

All he had to do to get on the list was retweet what they called anti-US propaganda, or GEC’s subjective definition of pro-Russian propaganda. No actual connection was required. Through this means, the GEC exactly rehabilitated the fellow-traveler concept used by infamous smear artists and witch hunters from history, from Leon Trotsky to the House Un-American Affairs Committee.

It was a way to accuse someone who hasn’t done anything wrong of guilt by ideological association. And I’ll just wrap up, I’ve gone over my time, but they weren’t looking for misinformation and disinformation, they were looking for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, obedience and disobedience. The idea behind GEC in particular was finding a way to propagandize American citizens and encourage acceptance of official policy the way we’ve always done to foreign populations.

It’s a flagrant violation of First Amendment ideals and should be eradicated from the government completely. No one should have this tool, not Democrats, not the Trump administration, nobody. Gentleman’s time has expired.

Thank you.