Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter may have capped the opening chapter in the Information Wars, where free speech won a small but crucial battle. Full spectrum combat across the digital landscape, however, will only intensify, as a new report from the Brookings Institution, a key player in the censorship industrial complex, demonstrates.
First, a review.
Reams of internal documents, known as the Twitter Files, show that social media censorship in recent years was far broader and more systematic than even we critics suspected. Worse, the files exposed deep cooperation – even operational integration – among Twitter and dozens of Government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, DOD, CIA, Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, and, of course, the White House.
Government agencies also enlisted a host of academic and non-profit organisations to do their dirty work. The Global Engagement Center, housed in the State Department, for example, was originally launched to combat international terrorism but has now been repurposed to target Americans.
The U.S. State Department also funded a U.K. outfit called the Global Disinformation Index, which blacklists American individuals and groups and convinces advertisers and potential vendors to avoid them. Homeland Security created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab – which flagged for social suppression tens of millions of messages posted by American citizens.
Even former high Government U.S. officials got in on the act – appealing directly (and successfully) to Twitter to ban mischief-making truth-tellers.
With the total credibility collapse of legacy media over the last 15 years, people around the world turned to social media for news and discussion. When social media then began censoring the most pressing topics, such as COVID-19, people increasingly turned to podcasts. Physicians and analysts who’d been suppressed on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and who were of course nowhere to be found in legacy media, delivered via podcasts much of the very best analysis on the broad array of pandemic science and policy.
Which brings us to the new report from Brookings, which concludes that one of the most prolific sources of ‘misinformation’ is now – you guessed it – podcasts. And further, that the underregulation of podcasts is a grave danger.
In ‘Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims,’ Valerie Wirtschafter writes:
Due in large part to the say-whatever-you-want perceptions of the medium, podcasting offers a critical avenue through which unsubstantiated and false claims proliferate. As the terms are used in this report, the terms ‘false claims’, ‘misleading claims’, ‘unsubstantiated claims’ or any combination thereof are evaluations by the research team of the underlying statements and assertions grounded in the methodology laid out below in the research design section and appendices. Such claims, evidence suggests, have played a vital role in shaping public opinion and political behaviour. Despite these risks, the podcasting ecosystem and its role in political debates have received little attention for a variety of reasons, including the technical difficulties in analysing multi-hour, audio-based content and misconceptions about the medium.
To analyse the millions of hours of audio content, Brookings used natural language processing to search for key words and phrases. It then relied on self-styled fact-checking sites Politifact and Snopes – pause for uproarious laughter… exhale – to determine the truth or falsity of these statements. Next, it deployed a ‘cosine similarity’ function to detect similar false statements in other podcasts.
The result: “Conservative podcasters were 11 times more likely than liberal podcasters to share claims fact-checked as false or unsubstantiated.”
One show Brookings misclassified as “conservative” is the Dark Horse science podcast hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Over the past three years, they meticulously explored the complex world of Covid, delivering scintillating insights and humbly correcting their infrequent missteps. Brookings, however, determined 13.8% of their shows contained false information.
What would the Brookings methodology, using a different set of fact checkers, spit out if applied to CNN, the Washington Post, the FDA, CDC, or hundreds of blogs, podcasts, TV doctors, and ‘science communicators’ who got nearly everything wrong?
Speaking on journalist Matt Taibbi’s podcast, novelist Walter Kirn skewered the new AI fact-checking scheme. It pretends to turn censorship into a “mathematical, not Constitutional, concern” – or, as he calls it, “sciency, sciency, sciency bullshit”.
The daisy chain of presumptuous omniscience, selection bias and false precision employed to arrive at these supposedly quantitative conclusions about the vast, diverse, sometimes raucous, and often enlightening world of online audio is preposterous.
And yet it is deadly serious.
The collapse of support for free speech among Western pseudo-elites is the foundation of so many other problems, from medicine to war. Misinformation is the natural state of the world. Open science and vigorous debate are the tools we deploy to become less wrong over time. Individual and collective decision-making depend on them.
Bret Swanson is President of the technology research firm Entropy Economics LLC and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and first appeared on the author’s Substack.
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More delusional reporting about how the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer’s policies have a significant bearing on the cost of UK debt.
The UK is already bankrupt. Like most countries with a bloated overbearing state.
I’m not defending Rachel Reeves or any politician, but some minor policies which represent a drop in our ocean of debt is what wrecked our economy.
That should be “isn’t what wrecked our economy”
My take on the matter:
1.) Any reasonable market analyst or investor must have had strong suspicions about a Labour government anyway, as historically every single Labour government left the economy in worse shape than is had been before they took over.
2.) But they gave Starmer’s government the benefit of doubt. Maybe this time it will be different. You never know.
3.) By now they have realized that their suspicions were well founded, Labour haven’t got a clue and Rachel from Accounts is indeed incompetent.
4.) Borrowing cost up, pound devalued as a result.
Liz Truss may have been a careless driver but was never given a chance to improve. Whereas Rachel Reeves is totally reckless behind the wheel. Her licence to kill our economy should be immediately withdrawn with a life ban.
Rubbish.
Reeves is deliberately trashing the economy, targeting those who Labour hates.
Truss would have been the best Tory PM in 14 years, except she went too fast, too soon and was mugged by the blob. They couldn’t have her fracking, ending ECHR, moving our embassy to Jerusalem, lowering taxes.
Listen to her recent interviews and she, for my money, is leading the charge against the blob that is the real enemy within. She understands and explains how we need a people’s movement, properly led and focused on the 5th Column.
This naive reporting angers me, to be honest.
I agree. In fact this is typical pseudo-journalism. Kate Andrews seeks to make a thesis out of a very straightforward bit of politics, not economics just vicious politics.
Rachel from accounts is acting under orders and those orders are to destroy the British economy and its people. Andrews hasn’t worked this out yet and has sought a hi-brow explanation. The reality is she hasn’t got a scooby and is talking nonsense.
She works for Gove. That’s all you need to know.
Good point.
What was unknown at the time of the Truss budget was that the pensions industry had decided to play casino games with the money in the pension schemes by using LDIs. The Bank of England also neglected to inform Truss or Kwarteng that they selling off a tranche of QE bonds when the budget was announced in what could be seen as a deliberate act of sabotage.
Rachel from Accounts had fucked up all on her own and delivered mortgage rates higher than Truss did.
Let’s not forget that the “necessary intervention” to shore up the LDI pension scheme included the Bank of England’s own pension scheme.
I’m sure the “intervention” was completely necessary and nothing to do with that
That’s more like it.
Interesting (to me) that the thesis in the article alleges that ‘Rachel Reeves is Making the Same Mistake as Liz Truss‘
Surely a more valid comparison would be between Truss and Starmer – what with them both being PM? Or between Kwarteng and Reeves.
I think Starmer is being let off too lightly on the fiscal incompetence argument.
I do not believe there is “fiscal incompetence.” It is inconceivable that so many ministers and civil servants could be acting in a manner so patently fiscally incontinent. They are acting under orders and those orders are to destroy the economy and thus the nation. Nothing these days is as it seems.
I stopped my Spectator subscription because of this person. Needless to say I did not waste my time reading the article.
I suspect that the exchange rate plays more of a role than is discussed here. The govt wants to repay loans in pounds, but why would an investor want to have pounds? The govt is trashing the productive part of the economy, via unnecessary increases in energy prices, taxes, and regulations.
What use will a pound be in 5 years time?
Why would they want to “finance the transition” when “the transition£ is clearly going to destroy our economy since it’s intended to outsource all manufacturing and ensure we have the most expensive energy on the planet?
If the markets (in 22) were mainly reacting to the government’s plan to subsidise energy costs, why didn’t they react two weeks earlier when the announcement was actually made and why didn’t the enormous cost of lockdowns create any panic?
A very simplistic assessment.
Truss’ budget was a lukewarm centrist plan with a strong empirical basis. The energy subsidy was ill advised but despite her plan being thrown out the energy subsidy continued as did money printing and currency devaluation. Furthermore the continuing vast green energy subsidies still continue despite the high debt and low productivity of the UK. The article fails to grasp deeper problems.