Blaming
Russia for the Internet ‘Sewer’
As the
Russia-gate hysteria spirals down from the
implausible to the absurd, almost every bad thing is
blamed on the Russians, even how they turned the
previously pristine Internet into a “sewer,” reports
Robert Parry.
By
Robert Parry
October 20,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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With the U.S.
government
offering tens of
millions of dollars to combat Russian “propaganda
and disinformation,” it’s perhaps not surprising
that we see “researchers” such as Jonathan Albright
of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia
University making the absurd accusation that the
Russians have “basically turned [the Internet] into
a sewer.”
I’ve been
operating on the Internet since 1995 and I can
assure you that the Internet has always been “a
sewer” — in that it has been home to crazy
conspiracy theories, ugly personal insults,
click-bait tabloid “news,” and pretty much every
vile prejudice you can think of. Whatever some
Russians may or may not have done in buying $100,000
in ads on Facebook (compared to its $27 billion in
annual revenue) or opening 201 Twitter accounts (out
of Twitter’s 328 million monthly users), the
Russians are not responsible for the sewage coursing
through the Internet.
Americans,
Europeans, Asians, Africans and pretty much every
other segment of the world’s population didn’t need
Russian help to turn the Internet into an
informational “sewer.” But, of course, fairness and
proportionality have no place in today’s Russia-gate
frenzy.
After
all, your “non-governmental organization” or your
scholarly “think tank” is not likely
to get a piece of the $160 million
that the U.S. government authorized last December to
counter primarily Russian “propaganda and
disinformation” if you explain that the Russians are
at most responsible for a tiny trickle of “sewage”
compared to the vast rivers of “sewage” coming from
many other sources.
If
you put the Russia-gate controversy in context, you
also are not likely to have your “research”
cited by The Washington Post
as Albright did on Thursday because he supposedly
found some links at the home-décor/fashion site
Pinterest to a few articles that derived from a few
of the 470 Facebook accounts and pages that Facebook
suspects of having a link to Russia and shut them
down. (To put that 470 number into perspective,
Facebook has about two billion monthly users.)
Albright’s
full quote about the Russians allegedly exploiting
various social media platforms on the Internet was:
“They’ve gone to every possible medium and basically
turned it into a sewer.”
But let’s
look at the facts. According to Facebook, the
suspected “Russian-linked” accounts purchased
$100,000 in ads from 2015 to 2017 (compared to
Facebook’s annual revenue of about $27 billion),
with only 44 percent of those ads appearing
before the 2016 election and many having
little or nothing to do with politics, which is
curious if the Kremlin’s goal was to help elect
Donald Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.
Even former
Clinton political strategist Mark Penn has
acknowledged the absurdity of thinking that such
piddling amounts could have any impact on a $2.4
billion presidential campaign, plus all the billions
of dollars worth of free-media attention to the
conventions, debates, etc. Based on what’s known
about the Facebook ads, Penn calculated that “the
actual electioneering [in battleground states]
amounts to about $6,500.”
In a Wall
Street Journal op-ed on Monday, Penn added, “I have
40 years of experience in politics, and this Russian
ad buy mostly after the election anyway, simply does
not add up to a carefully targeted campaign to move
voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to
deliver meaningful messages to the contested portion
of the electorate.”
Puppies and Pokemon
And,
then there is the curious content. According to The
New York Times, one of these “Russian-linked”
Facebook groups was
dedicated to photos of “adorable puppies.”
Of course, the Times tried hard to detect some
sinister motive behind the “puppies” page.
Similarly, CNN went wild over
its own “discovery”
that one of the “Russian-linked” pages offered
Amazon gift cards to people who found “Pokémon Go”
sites near scenes where police shot unarmed black
men — if you would name the Pokémon after the
victims.
“It’s
unclear what the people behind the contest hoped to
accomplish, though it may have been to remind people
living near places where these incidents had taken
place of what had happened and to upset or anger
them,” CNN mused, adding:
“CNN has
not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users
attempted to enter the contest, or whether any of
the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever
awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who
designed the contest ever had any intention of
awarding the prizes.”
So, these
dastardly Russians are exploiting “adorable puppies”
and want to “remind people” about unarmed victims of
police violence, clearly a masterful strategy to
undermine American democracy or – according to the
original Russia-gate narrative – to elect Donald
Trump.
A New
York Times
article on
Wednesday acknowledged another inconvenient truth
that unintentionally added more perspective to the
Russia-gate hysteria.
It turns
out that some of the mainstream media’s favorite
“fact-checking” organizations are home to Google ads
that look like news items and lead readers to phony
sites dressed up to resemble People, Vogue or other
legitimate content providers.
“None of
the stories were true,” the Times reported. “Yet as
recently as late last week, they were being promoted
with prominent ads served by Google on PolitiFact
and Snopes, fact-checking sites created precisely to
dispel such falsehoods.”
There is
obvious irony in PolitiFact and Snopes profiting off
“fake news” by taking money for these Google ads.
But this reality also underscores the larger reality
that fabricated news articles – whether peddling
lies about Melania Trump or a hot new celebrity or
outlandish Russian plots – are driven principally by
the profit motive.
The
Truth About Fake News
Occasionally, the U.S. mainstream media even
acknowledges that fact. For instance, last November,
The New York Times, which was then flogging
the Russia-linked “fake news” theme,
ran
a relatively responsible article
about a leading “fake news” Web site that the Times
tracked down. It turned out to be an entrepreneurial
effort by an unemployed Georgian student using a Web
site in Tbilisi to make some money by promoting
pro-Trump stories, whether true or not.
The owner
of the Web site, 22-year-old Beqa Latsabidse, said
he had initially tried to push stories favorable to
Hillary Clinton but that proved unprofitable so he
switched to publishing anti-Clinton and pro-Trump
articles, including made-up stories. In other words,
the Times found no Russian connection.
The Times
article on Wednesday revealed the additional problem
of Google ads placed on mainstream Internet sites
leading readers to bogus news sites to get clicks
and thus advertising dollars. And, it turns out that
PolitiFact and Snopes were at least unwittingly
profiting off these entrepreneurial ventures by
running their ads. Again, there was no claim here of
Russian “links.” It was all about good ole American
greed.
But the
even larger Internet problem is that many
“reputable” news sites, such as AOL, lure readers
into clicking on some sensationalistic or misleading
headline, which takes readers to a story that is
often tabloid trash or an extreme exaggeration of
what the headline promised.
This
reality about the Internet should be the larger
context in which the Russia-gate story plays out,
the miniscule nature of this Russian “meddling” even
if these “suspected … links to Russia” – as the
Times initially described the 470 Facebook pages –
turn out to be true.
But there
are no lucrative grants going to “researchers” who
would put the trickle of alleged Russian “sewage”
into the context of the vast flow of Internet
“sewage” that is even flowing through the esteemed
“fact-checking” sites of PolitiFact and Snopes.
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants -
This Is
Independent
Media
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There are
also higher newspaper sales and better TV ratings if
the mainstream media keeps turning up new angles on
Russia-gate, even as some of the old ones fall away
as inconsequential or meaningless (such as the
Senate Intelligence Committee dismissing earlier
controversies over Sen. Jeff Sessions’s brief
meeting with the Russian ambassador at the Mayflower
Hotel and minor changes in the Republican platform).
Saying ‘False’ Is ‘True’
And,
there is the issue of who decides what’s true.
PolitiFact continues to
defend its false claim
that Hillary Clinton was speaking the truth when –
in referencing leaked Democratic emails last October
– she claimed that the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies
“have all concluded that these espionage attacks,
these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of
the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our
election.”
That claim
was always untrue because a reference to a consensus
of the 17 intelligence agencies suggests a National
Intelligence Estimate or similar product that seeks
the judgments of the entire intelligence community.
No NIE or community-wide study was ever done on this
topic.
Only
later – in January 2017 – did a small subset of the
intelligence community, what Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper
described as “hand-picked” analysts
from three agencies – the Central Intelligence
Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau
of Investigation – issue an “assessment” blaming the
Russians while
acknowledging a lack of actual evidence.
In other
words, the Jan. 6 “assessment” was comparable to the
“stovepiped” intelligence that influenced many of
the mistaken judgments of President George W. Bush’s
administration. In “stovepiped” intelligence, a
selected group of analysts is closeted away and
develops judgments without the benefit of other
experts who might offer contradictory evidence or
question the groupthink.
So,
in many ways, Clinton’s statement was the opposite
of true both when she said it in 2016 and later in
2017 when
she repeated it in
direct reference to the Jan. 6 assessment. If
PolitiFact really cared about facts, it would have
corrected its earlier claim that Clinton was telling
the truth, but the fact-checking organization
wouldn’t budge — even after The New York Times and
The Associated Press ran corrections.
In this
context, PolitiFact showed its contempt even for
conclusive evidence – testimony from former DNI
Clapper (corroborated by former CIA Director John
Brennan) that the 17-agency claim was false.
Instead, PolitiFact was determined to protect
Clinton’s false statement from being described for
what it was: false.
Of course,
maybe PolitiFact is suffering from the arrogance of
its elite status as an arbiter of truth with its
position on Google’s First Draft coalition, a
collection of mainstream news outlets and
fact-checkers which gets to decide what information
is true and what is not true — for algorithms that
then will exclude or downplay what’s deemed “false.”
So, if
PolitiFact says something is true – even if it’s
false – it becomes “true.” Thus, it’s perhaps not
entirely ironic that PolitiFact would collect money
from Google ads placed on its site by advertisers of
fake news.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of
the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book,
America’s Stolen
Narrative,
either in print
here or as an
e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
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