The Revolution Will (Not) Be Digitized
The Twitter Files offer proof of long-suspected censorship efforts and government agents circumventing the Constitution. Why isn't the national press interested in the story?
“Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels ‘real bad’ about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows.”
— Joan Didion, ‘The White Album’
Over the last two and a half years, I’ve struggled immensely with the absence of fairness and ethics that exist in the American press today. The impact of the loss of balanced, ethical reporting on society is undeniable at this point — and the hostility directed at reporters by government officials and members of the national media in both the U.S. and U.K. has been chilling to watch.
Even at the local level, I’ve come face to face with policies and editorial decisions that I still cannot quite square away logically, as far as ethics go. Protest as I might — and I do protest — there is always some perplexing attempt to justify the decision to cover this but not that; to kill this story but publish that one; to eliminate certain information from a story altogether.
Often, those justifications seem to come down to the values of the editor or publisher (not society in general), or whichever funders are paying to keep the lights on, rather than the importance of the story to the public interest. It’s something that has left me wondering how long I will continue to work in journalism.
Last week’s Twitter Files revelations by journalists at The Free Press and reporter Matt Taibbi — and the national news coverage that stunningly didn’t follow — only served to harden my disappointment in American journalism. How, exactly, did newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post — whose legacy is taking the U.S. government to task for its wartime lies at great risk to each publication’s existence — end up essentially brushing off hard proof of the same government’s recent efforts to circumvent the Constitution and pressure private tech companies to censor regular American citizens online?
In the Post’s case, how did a major paper of record go from publishing the Pentagon Papers to twisting the Twitter Files into a discussion about Elon Musk’s independent business choices, poor as they might be, rather than investigating the clandestine efforts of the U.S. government (specifically, the FBI) to pressure Twitter’s former leadership into censoring credentialed scientists, academics, activists, media personalities, and everyday citizens online — the majority of whom appear to have made only mundane statements and posed no legitimate threat to national security whatsoever.
A glance at social media — and every major newspaper in the nation — shows there is no shortage of editors and journalists in the U.S. that genuinely don’t seem to care what the government did to silence citizens’ voices online, so long as it wasn’t done to them or their friends. While this response may be unsurprising, coming on the heels several years of petty, and sometimes even incompetent, rhetoric from popular reporters and pundits on social media, it’s also unnerving.
Regardless of Musk’s motives for releasing the files to a handful of independent reporters on the outside of the Old Guard, the release of the Twitter Files proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that our government utilized tactics to circumvent the Constitution and pressure a private company into censoring dissent. A national press that is collectively too petty to acknowledge when its freedoms are threatened by its government is a press that is worthless to democracy, at best — and dangerous at worst.
Censorship doesn’t exist to protect the powerless
From press censorship and propaganda (the two usually go hand-in-hand) in Italy under Mussolini’s Fascist party to the censorship of the so-called “Degenerate Artists” in Europe under the Nazi regime, censorship has never been employed to protect the marginalized.
It is always — always — a tool of the powerful used to crush those with less power. The people on the margins that languished under the rule of history’s most notorious leaders, from Stalin to Mao, can attest to that.
But censorship is not unique to far-away nations under totalitarian rule. The Pentagon Papers themselves are a testament to how dangerous censorship has been in the U.S. Countless Americans gave their lives in a failed war that should have ended years sooner, had the government not lied — over and over — to its citizens about our nation’s supposed successes in Vietnam.
Sock puppets and the manipulation of reality
The same could be said of the U.S. government’s attempts to control reality during its more recent invasion of Iraq following 9.11 and the war that followed — an event I have been slowly learning about in hindsight, given my age (and level of frivolity) at the time.
In 2011, news reports about the existence of a secret military “sock puppet” operation began to emerge. The U.S. military, it appeared, had begun to employ the use of seemingly-real, but fake, online personalities to influence public perception and spread propaganda on social media — a tactic they had originally developed under a project called Operation Earnest Voice, in which the military sought to counter extremist voices online through the use of fake personas during the Iraq war.
The use of sock puppets enables governments and their contractors to create the false impression on social media that large amounts users within a given population favor certain ideologies or policies — even if those values aren’t representative of the population’s actual values or beliefs offline.
According to a report about the secret project in The Guardian from that year:
The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.1
While the dangers of sock puppets online are very real, the use of false narratives to shape public perception isn’t limited to social media. Real people have also been employed to spread propaganda and squash dissenting ideas — as illustrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning expose by journalist David Barstow for the New York Times in 2008. Barstow’s reporting uncovered the strategic use of “military analysts” appearing on news shows and in news reports to push specific narratives supporting the Bush administration’s national security and foreign policy agenda — including a defense of the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay. According to the report:
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants.2
The U.S. government’s long and unapologetic history of using sock puppets to influence public opinion and create false impressions — both online and off — should raise questions for journalists, academics, activists and citizens about whether some of the common justifications for limiting free speech online need to be scrutinized more thoroughly.
Although there is no evidence currently available that any of the more extreme accounts on Twitter (often cited in defense of censorship) are fake, Musk’s scrutiny of the true number of fake Twitter accounts during his acquisition of the company raise important questions about whether or not offensive sock puppet accounts could be utilized dishonestly by government officials, contractors, or activist groups to create the appearance of online threats and justify more heavy-handed censorship efforts, either now or in the future.
Given the U.S. government's eagerness to censor even mild forms of dissent online, as revealed by the Twitter Files, it seems plausible that such tactics could be employed in the future — something that could pose a threat to citizens and journalists everywhere under the wrong administration.
Who will guard the guards themselves?
The idea of the national news overlooking or refusing to cover stories of significant public interest is, unfortunately, nothing new.
In 2016, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung began to publish a series of reports based on the Panama Papers — more than 11.5 million documents that had been provided to them by an anonymous leaker known only as “John Doe” and verified by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a network of investigative journalists around the globe. The documents revealed corruption and financial wrongdoing of powerful people, including elected officials, in the majority of nations across the world.
While the reporting garnered some attention — and landed some powerful people in jail — it was not covered to the extent that one would expect for such a massive story. In fact, many people today haven’t heard of the Panama Papers (perhaps you’re one of them?). Later that year, in a manifesto on global economic inequality and the revelations of the Panama Papers, Doe wrote:
The media has failed. Many news networks are cartoonish parodies of their former selves, individual billionaires appear to have taken up newspaper ownership as a hobby, limiting coverage of serious matters concerning the wealthy, and serious investigative journalists lack funding.
The impact is real: in addition to Süddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ, and despite explicit claims to the contrary, several major media outlets did have editors review documents from the Panama Papers. They chose not to cover them. The sad truth is that among the most prominent and capable media organizations in the world there was not a single one interested in reporting on the story. Even Wikileaks didn’t answer its tip line repeatedly.
The Twitter Files, like the Panama Papers and so many others, are an example of yet another failure by the national press to defend liberal and democratic values and hold the powerful to account for their abuse of power.
As I’ve written before, all forms of oppression are connected. The censoring of voices representing one political ideology will almost certainly lead to the silencing of others as time goes on. Will your voice be next?
Fielding, Nick and Ian Cobain. “Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media.” The Guardian, March 17, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks (retrieved Dec. 18, 2022).
Barstow, David. “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.” The New York Times, April 20, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html (retrieved Dec. 18, 2022).