Tag: disinformation

Troubling questions surround BBC ‘disinformation correspondent’ Marianna Spring

Little is known about the history of Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first “disinformation correspondent.” But her record of churning out disinfo of her own in the service of British government objectives sends a bright red flag up over the new Verify project. 

The launch of BBC Verify, “a new brand to address the growing threat of disinformation and build trust with audiences by transparently showing how BBC journalists know the information they are reporting,” has raised questions about whether the British state broadcaster is ramping up plans to manufacture consent for official objectives while maligning dissent. 

The endeavor is said to be “a highly specialized team with a range of forensic and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) capabilities that enable them to go beyond conventional newsroom techniques.” In all, 60 BBC journalists are involved – including the “specialist disinformation correspondent” Marianna Spring.

The week after Verify’s rollout was announced, the 27-year-old Spring took to airwaves to acquaint BBC Breakfast viewers with her new venture. She explained its mission was to “verify video, factcheck, counter disinformation, and analyze really complex stories so we can get to the truth of what’s going on.”

Standing before three interactive video screens, Spring outlined an array of investigative projects soon to appear under the auspices of Verify. They included an initiative employing “undercover accounts” which comprise a set of fake “characters” active on social media networks. The ostensible purpose of the sock-puppets created by Spring and her BBC associates is to “really understand polarization online and what’s happening on our social media feeds and what we’re being recommended and being pushed to us [sic] can affect all of us.”

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INSIDE THE PENTAGON’S NEW “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT” OFFICE TO COUNTER DISINFORMATION

NOT LONG AFTER the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched what it called the Office of Strategic Influence, which would seek to “counter the enemy’s perception management” in the so-called war on terror. But it quickly became clear that the office, operating under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, would be managing those perceptions with its own disinformation.

As the New York Times reported at the time, its work was to “provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists in an effort to influence overseas opinion.” In the nascent Internet age, observers worried the propaganda could boomerang back on Americans.

“The question is whether the Pentagon and military should undertake an official program that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad,” the Times reported in 2004. “But in a modern world wired by satellite television and the Internet, any misleading information and falsehoods could easily be repeated by American news outlets.”

Now, two decades later, “perception management” is once again becoming a central focus for the national security state. On March 1, 2022, the Pentagon established a new office with similar goals to the one once deemed too controversial to remain open. Very little has been made public about the effort, which The Intercept learned about through a review of budget documents and an internal memo we obtained. This iteration is called the Influence and Perception Management Office, or IPMO, according to the memo, which was produced by the office for an academic institution, and its responsibilities include overseeing and coordinating the various counter-disinformation efforts being conducted by the military, which can include the U.S.’s own propaganda abroad.

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UFO DISINFO: Four times the US military hoaxed alien contact through the decades

In June 2021, if you were to new to ‘UFO Twitter’ or other social media and websites discussing the UFO topic, you might quite reasonably conclude that this is the year of upper-case D ‘Disclosure’ – finally, the long-awaited revelation from the U.S. government about the existence of alien craft visiting the Earth. From the last four years of revelations in major newspaper and television features regarding military pilots sighting UFOs, through the regular release in recent months of new UFO videos ‘leaked’ from military sources, to this month’s upcoming official report from the Pentagon on what they know about UAPs/UFOs, there has been an accumulation of new information that has led to a growing anticipation of ‘something big’ around the corner.

Many older heads in the UFO scene, though, have been more circumspect. While they have been dismissed by the ‘noobs’ in the scene as being bitter, overly cynical, living in the past and/or not being able to keep up with the recent deluge of information, there is a reason for their skepticism: they know that, for many decades now, certain elements of the U.S. military have worked to seed fake UFO and alien contact information into the public consciousness for their own purposes.

Whatsmore, as Adam Gorightly points out in his book Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO disinformation in the Age of Aquarius, a number of these cases involved supposedly rogue US military and intelligence employees revealing secret UFO/alien information to ambitious film-makers and researchers covering UFO and paranormal topics. Sound familiar?

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DHS heavily redacted Disinformation Board emails despite claiming agency had nothing to hide

When the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board burst into public view, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there was nothing sinister to hide and claimed the office was rooted in “best practices.”

A year later, Mayorkas’ department is refusing to let Americans see most of the legal justifications and talking points it created to defend the now-disbanded board from “blowback,” FOIA documents showed. 

More than 100 pages of internal communication between the board’s former executive director, Nina Jankowicz, and her staff were released with heavy redactions to the conservative nonprofit Citizens United. 

What little is visible makes clear that DHS underestimated the negative reaction the board would provoke and was scrambling to find ways to keep the story from being pushed by “hostile” news outlets.

In the FOIA emails, Jankowicz cited “blowback and abuse” after certain media outlets began describing the board as the “Ministry of Truth” as word spread about its formation. 

“There is a fair possibility this could end up on a hostile TV network in the coming days,” she wrote.

Some of the communications show the board’s responses to direct questions posed in a letter from Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), such as what language in the Constitution allows DHS to create such a board and hire staff for it.

Other questions included which parts of DHS would be “responsible for monitoring and collecting data” on misinformation and what “specific actions” DHS intended to take to “counter misinformation.” Each answer was redacted by the department. 

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A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.

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New Law Sought by Brazil’s Lula to Ban and Punish “Fake News and Disinformation” Threatens the Free Internet Everywhere

A major escalation in official online censorship regimes is progressing rapidly in Brazil, with implications for everyone in the democratic world. Under Brazil’s new government headed by President Lula da Silva, the country is poised to become the first in the democratic world to implement a law censoring and banning, and punishing not only “fake news” and “disinformation” online, but also punishing those deemed guilty of spreading it. Such laws already exist throughout the non-democratic world, adopted years ago by the planet’s most tyrannical regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. 

If one wishes to be generous with the phrase “the democratic world” and include Malaysia and Singapore – at best hybrid “democracies” – then one could argue that a couple other “democratic” governments have already seized the power to decree Absolute Truth and then ban any deviation from it. But absent unexpected opposition, Brazil will soon become the first country unambiguously included in the democratic world to outlaw “fake news” and vest government officials with the power to banish it and punish its authors. 

Last May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was forced to retreat from its attempt to appoint a “disinformation czar” to oversee what would effectively be its Ministry of Truth. That new DHS agency, at least nominally, was to be only advisory: it would declare truth and falsity and then pressure online platforms to comply by banning that which was deemed false. The backlash was so great that DHS finally claimed to cancel it, though secret documents emerged in October describing the agency’s plans to continue to shape online censorship decisions of Big Tech. 

Brazil’s law would be anything but advisory. Though the details are still yet to be released, it would empower law enforcement officials to take action against citizens deemed to be publishing statements that the government classifies as “false,” and to solicit courts to impose punishment on those who do so.

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Ad Network Owned by Microsoft Is Using Foreign Disinformation ‘Experts’ to Blacklist Conservative Media Companies

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a foreign think tank headquartered in the United Kingdom, released an assessment of American online media designed to blacklist conservative media outlets and choke off their advertising revenue. The information is kept on what GDI calls its “Dynamic Exclusion List.”

Ad networks — including most prominently Xandr — which is owned by Microsoft — are now using this list to refuse to allow advertising on conservative media websites.

Microsoft has yet to respond to a request for comment regarding Xandr’s use of the Dynamic Exclusion List, which is censoring conservative outlets. 

GDI in December released its report that detailed the alleged “disinformation risk” for the American online media market in partnership with the Global Disinformation Lab (GDIL), a think tank at the University of Texas at Austin that generates policy recommendations and solutions to combat disinformation.  

The GDI report on the American online media landscape reviewed 69 news outlets, and listed ten outlets it found are the most at risk of spreading disinformation, and ten outlets that are the least likely to spread disinformation. GDI rated conservative sites as having the highest risk for spreading disinformation and liberal websites as the most trusted.

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WHO releases international pandemic treaty zero draft that targets “misinformation” and “disinformation”

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a zero draft of its international pandemic treaty which will give the unelected global health agency new powers to “tackle” anything that it deems to be “false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation” if passed.

The WHO has been pushing the treaty since December 2021 and those drafting the treaty intend to present a final report to the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s decision-making body, in May 2024.

If adopted, the treaty will be legally binding under international law and the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) would be required to comply with the treaty’s demands to target misinformation.

The zero draft is similar to previous versions of the treaty and the provisions related to misinformation are described in Article 17 (“Strengthening pandemic and public health literacy”).

This section of the treaty calls for member states to “tackle false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation, including through promotion of international cooperation.”

It also urges member states to manage “infodemics” — a term coined by the WHO that refers to “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.” Specifically, member states are told to manage these so-called infodemics “through effective channels, including social media.”

The scope of this treaty also extends beyond the WHO’s member base. Article 16 (“Whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches at the national level”) urges member states to collaborate with non-state actors and the private sector as part of a “whole-of-society response in decision making, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, as well as effective feedback mechanisms.”

We obtained a copy of the zero draft of the WHO’s pandemic treaty for you here.

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Who Determines What’s ‘Disinformation’?

Why are we being bombarded by fact-checks and “anti-disinformation” efforts in our timeline scrolls? When reading the news, we too often find that so-called experts are behind whatever claim media professionals make, no matter how outlandish or disconnected from reality such claims may be.

Through his concept and exploration of spectacle, a totalizing, negating force over our lives that results in what is really “unlife,” French Philosopher Guy Debord’s famous Society of the Spectacle (1967) and his follow-up booklet, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), provide insights into these and related phenomena. 

When it comes to “fact-checks” and “experts,” Debord is clear: in a society subjugated by the economy, where “everything that was once directly lived has faded into representation,” such professionals do not exist to provide us the truth — they exist to serve the state and media through lies and distortions spun into what appears as true. If the “experts” lose influence, it will be because the public learns and articulates that their job is to systematically lie.

“Disinformation” appears as one of the biggest bogeymen in today’s increasingly online world. Governments warn of the dangers it apparently poses to society and democracy, and mainstream media organizations in turn direct resources to counter-disinformation and to fact-checking. In the name of “being informed,” people cannot often go online without being bombarded by fact-checks or warnings about what content to consume and share with their social and professional networks.

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