Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation.
If the recent rush of news stories about the horror of foreign-inspired AI deepfakes (“No one can stop them,” gasps the Washington Post) creating intolerable risk to the coming “AI election” sounds a bit off to you, you’re not alone. This is one of many potential threats pro-censorship groups are playing up in hopes of deploying more aggressive “counter-messaging” tools. Some early proposals along those lines are in the unpublished Twitter Files documents we’ve been working on. Again, more on this topic soon.
Also: beginning around the time we published the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Racket in partnership with UndeadFOIA began issuing Freedom of Information requests in bulk. The goal was to identify inexcusably secret contractors of content-policing agencies like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The FOIA system is designed to exhaust citizens, but our idea was to match the irritating resolve of FOIA officers by pre-committing resources for inevitable court disputes, fights over production costs, etc. Thanks to UndeadFOIA’s great work, we now have a sizable library of documents about publicly-funded censorship programs (and a few private ones scooped up in official correspondence).
We’ll be releasing those, too, focusing on a few emails per batch, and publishing the rest in bulk. There’s so much material that a quick global summary here would be difficult, but suffice to say that the anti-disinformation/content control world is much bigger than I thought, enjoying cancer-like growth on campuses in particular, in the same way military research became primary sources of grants and took over universities in the fifties and sixties. Some of these FOIA documents are damning, some entertaining, some just interesting, but all of them belong to the public. We’re going to start the process of turning them over, hopefully today.
Turn on the lights and watch the roaches scatter. And stomp on any that don’t.