I thought it'd be about the Methodists. They're in there, but it looks more like it'll be about the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, where Republican Roy Moore, the shoe-in, lost narrowly to Democrat Doug Jones.
My interest, as I blogged about the other day, concerns the actions of some US-based internet interventions, most famously (thanks to NY Times reporters Scott Shane and Alan Blinder) artificially bumping up the online following for a write-in GOP opponent to Moore and funding some fake grassroots prohibition groups such as "Dry Alabama," designed to scare off non-prohibitionist Republicans from supporting Moore. Similar false flag operations (apparently unrelated) seem to have taken place in midterm elections in Texas and Tennessee
Less well-known is work by Joohn Choe of Dialectica, who mobilized sophisticated, meme design and dissemination techniques to target and activate moderate, reachable Christian voters to resist Moore. (As far as I can tell, Choe did not use the same kind of false-flag, wedge-issue tactics as the interventions above did).
All of these initiatives came from left-progressive groups. Many were funded and staffed by Democratic donors (most prominently Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn) and former Obama/Clinton staff. As the Times stories (and trace-the-money follow ups by the Washington Post) emerged in late 2018 and 2019, most Democrats condemned the actions. Hoffman and Johnathon Morgan (New Knowledge's CEO) both distanced themselves from the acts. Other participants went mum, having singed nondisclosure agreements. Moore got to play the wither-civility? card (conveniently bracketing his history of extremist stances against women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folk).
Some activists, however, remain unapologetic about mimicking Russian "dirty tricks." Alabama activist and former cryptography officer Matt Osborne, who helped spearhead the prohibition wedge issue strategy defends the tactic. “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” he told The Times, “You have a moral imperative to do this — to do whatever it takes." Choe's robust justification sounds some of the same notes:
In this context [the 2017 campaign], seeing the commitment of the Russian information warfare infrastructure that I was seeing and the single-mindedness with which it was assisting the Moore side, the only rational conclusion that I could draw was that I had a moral obligation to counter-act it. My focus shifted from studying disinformation and opposing it experimentally to fighting it wholesale with whatever tools were at hand. Given the state of knowledge I had — that we have, as a society — I concluded that it was the only ethical option available at the time, and I believe it remains so.It's war. The other side's already doing it. We're fools--worse, we're wicked--not to do the same.
I accept that Osborne and Choe might be right. But I'm very, very distrustful of that sense of righteous furor, so like religious conviction. Once you're so convicted, it becomes easy to justify the memes with the ends.
More tomorrow,
JF
No comments:
Post a Comment