"Our joint investigation found an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia. The platforms’ datasets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over aperiod of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation. These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran. The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the Kremlin’s “imperial ambitions” following its invasion of Ukraine in February this year. To promote this and other narratives, the accounts sometimes shared news articles from U.S. government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the U.S. military. A portion of the activity also promoted anti-extremism messaging."
"The Pentagon acknowledged in a newly declassified document released on Thursday that the US public is increasingly exposed to propaganda disseminated overseas in psychological operations. But the document suggests that the Pentagon believes the US law that prohibits exposing the public to propaganda does not apply to the unintended blowback from such operations."
"Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond."
"I also anticipate objections from those who might cringe at the VOA and its sister institutions being called purveyors of propaganda. The people will bend over backward as they explain how the VOA “firewall” and charter preserve the service’s independence and journalistic credibility. This, of course, is a crock. With one swift swing of his leather-soled shoe, Trump has breached the firewall and smashed its alleged independence, although a lawsuit to block Pack is in the works. As Ralph A. Uttaro wrote in a law journal in 1982, “The Voice of America, no less than Radio Moscow or Radio Prague, endeavors to change the attitudes of its listeners.” Yes, it informs, but the main idea is frame the news to the U.S. government’s benefit. If the only goal was to inform, the government could save everybody a lot of money and bother by rebroadcasting The Associated Press."
"...the election of Trump in 2016 constitutes the proverbial ‘year zero’ for fourth estate journalism. As a result of the ‘journalistic’ cultural revolution that ensued, it argues that the Propaganda Model needs to be overhauled if it is to retain its epistemological bona fides."
"This book seeks to show how the news media are recognizable as a political institution: because of their historical development, because of shared processes and predictable products across news organizations, and because of the way in which the work of newspersons is so intertwined with the work of official Washington that the news itself performs governmental tasks."
"I want to focus, however, on a different way in which media organizations might seek to influence policy: the indirect approach of using their publications or broadcasts to try and change the beliefs and policy preferences of mass and/or elite audiences, which would presumably affect subsequent policy decisions. This indirect approach might be especially attractive to media organizations because of their special positions as key disseminators of political information. Its use could have important implications for the nature of democratic deliberation." - pg. 20
"Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn’t based on principles such as consistency or observability. It’s not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards–standards that aren’t especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy."
"So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the subject, “the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.” But in practice, Wikipedia’s standard for inclusion has become its de facto standard for truth, and since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it’s the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject. That standard is simple: something is true if it was published in a newspaper article, a magazine or journal, or a book published by a university press–or if it appeared on Dr. Who"
"Wikipedia has become a ubiquitous source of information and, subsequently, the layperson’s reference: it is a concrete representation of common knowledge. Interrogating Wikipedia then can also be a way of interrogating a manifestation of how “facts” are made in the public sphere."
"To begin, many analytical philosophers have considered the epistemic effects of Wikipedia upon readers, particularly concerning reliability (e.g., Fallis 2008; Magnus 2009). Reliability has been a primary topic of investigation and concern for scholars writing about applied epistemology: the study of whether systems of investigation purporting to be seeking the truth are engineered to lead to true beliefs about the world (Laudan 2006). Other scholars have considered how Wikipedia functions as an example of group testimony (Tollefsen 2009) and, yet, has a different epistemic culture of knowledge production than, say, science because contributors have different goals, collaborate under different norms, and have different motivations (Wray 2009). In our critique and reimagining of the five pillars, we are concerned with reliability as it relates to the processes by which knowledge is produced on the site and who is excluded from these processes. We ask similar questions about Wikipedia as others have. However, we are interested mostly in Wikipedia’s mismatch in explicit and implicit values and how this mismatch impacts the ability of the site to function as “the sum of all human knowledge.”"
"Even though some authors allow for harmless conspiracy theories (Byford, 2011; Dentith, 2014), the term "conspiracy theory" is typically regarded as a loaded, pejorative one (see Wood, 2016;Bjerg and Presskorn-Thygesen, 2017;Martin, 2020)."
Sources regarding NYT misinformation and propaganda
"We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations." — Frédéric Bastiat
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, former CIA Director
"“It makes all the difference in the world whether we put Truth in the first place or in the second place.” - Richard Whately
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
