DISINFORMATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY IS COMING FROM AMERICANS

…Former FBI Agent, Clint Watts, who first broke alarm regarding Russia’s foreign political interference

The Fox Network, will obviously be involved with the  disinformation campaign of 2020

Well, the Dems took the House, but the GOP has added to their control of the Senate.

So, what does that mean for all Americans?

It means that there will now be investigations of the current president and his taxes and more support for protecting the Mueller investigation.

But it also means more conservative, life-time nominations of federal judges and it means that the conservative Senate would never support an impeachment of their Republican president.  Therefore, unless Trump is found to be so guilty that even the Republicans can’t support Trump, we’ve got him until at least 2020.  In addition, who is in the Democratic party that can take on Donald Trump in the 2020 election?  As of today, there doesn’t seem t be that beloved and capable Democrat that can take on the kind of race that Donald J. Trump will most likely use for maintaining his presidency..

On top of that, with the combination of the power of the Fox Network, and the disinformation campaign that will obviously occur in 2020, that election could be in serious trouble for the Democrats.

But this time it may not be those former issues with the Russians or with any foreign operation of interference.

A former FBI agent, Clint Watts, was among the first to ring the alarm bell about Russia’s disinformation campaign during the 2016 US election.  Two years later, as voters headed to the polls in another hotly contested national election, Watts gave us more bad news.  That was, when it comes to spreading lies and stoking division online, Watts now says, “it’s Americans that are doing the job.”

And this is not just the opinion of a former FBI agent.  Such is the attitude among many lawmakers, tech company officials and independent experts who have studied hate speech and related disinformation.  Even though Silicon Valley and social media has become more aggressive in going after foreign efforts getting involved in US politics, it is losing the cat-and-mouse games with Americans who are using the same techniques used by the Russians in 2016.

“Everyone’s witnessed the playbook that is  playing out,” explained Mr. Watts, who is also a "fellow" at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.  “Now they don’t need Russia so much. They’ve learned that the tactic is devastatingly effective.”

In fact, it is our current president that is also blatantly using these tactics when he spreads misleading reports and images about the so-called migrant caravan coming from Mexico.  He is particularly spreading the totally false allegations that billionaire George Soros is funding the caravan as a “violent invasion of the United States”.

Those accounts that were controlled by some Russians in 2016 that helped amplify those kinds of misleading narratives, but the evidence is that they actually started with American political activists who are increasingly capable of now doing all the online manipulation.

Over the past weeks, during the buildup of the political polarization ahead of this week’s vote, the power of social media was shown to spread hate speech and disinformation.  As an example, the man accused of shooting and killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue had expressed his hostility toward Jewish people in Gab.ai.  This is a social media site that caters to the extreme far right, while it also presented those same allegations about George Soros that have also been criticized as being extremely anti-Semitic.

In addition, the extremist, Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with sending pipe bombs to CNN and well-known Democrats last month, he displayed his radical views on Facebook and Twitter, months before his arrest.  Accounts in the name of this same man attacked Soros while he also peddled conspiracy theories of the former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

"I think the scale and scope of domestic disinformation is much larger than any foreign influence operation,” said Graham Brookie, Director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

This week, Facebook announced it had removed 30 accounts from their site, and another 85 on Instagram, which it also owns, that “appear engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior.”  Facebook did not attribute the accounts to any foreign government, but they noted that many Facebook pages tied to the accounts were in Russian or French, while the Instagram accounts used English.

Facebook did say that it had received reports from US law enforcement that the removed accounts, “may be linked to foreign entities.”

However, Facebook’s head of cyber-security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said that the bigger challenge remains detecting and policing the many Americans spreading of disinformation.

“If you’re talking about volume, the majority of the volume we see is domestic, Gleicher said. “It makes perfect sense when you think about it, because in order to run an information operation, the most important thing is that you understand the culture that you’re targeting. And there are always going to be more people inside a culture that can do that, than those on the outside.”

This observation is borne out by new research from Harvard and Oxford Universities. The Harvard researchers said that they had seen major spikes in outright fabrication and misleading information proliferating online over the past six months.  Those fabricating this information are even using vicious, war-like rhetoric in their social media posts to spread anti-immigrant sentiment.  A major portion of the disinformation appears to come from extremist Americans, not from foreigners.

The Oxford researchers have reported that misleading news reports were spreading more widely on social media today, in the 2018 election season, than it did two years ago. The disinformation today is reaching a much broader audience, and it is outrunning the spread of authentic news reports from mainstream, “professional” news organizations.

US tech companies “have done a good job tracking and blocking foreign origin stuff, content that originates from Russia, Iran or the Islamic State,” Oxford researcher Phil Howard said. “They have done much less to combat homegrown English language misinformation.”

Since the 2016 election, Facebook, Google and Twitter have hired more staff and coded more powerful algorithms to thwart disinformation spread by foreign or domestic actors online. But the tech giants also have been more aggressive at taking down fake accounts, while tightening policies against the kind of content.  This includes hate speech and efforts at voter suppression that they were formerly willing to tolerate on their platforms.

Domestic disinformation and hate speech are hardly anything new, but concerns about the Russians so dominated the political debate since the 2016 vote, that the actual role of Americans drew less attention in the scholarly reports, congressional hearings and news coverage.

With the arrival of the 2018 Election Day, there is a consensus among outside experts that technology companies are still losing the fight against politically charged hate speech and disinformation.  Lawmakers are expressing frustration that the tech companies haven’t done more to protect Americans from the untruths, conspiracy theories and hateful language that spreads so efficiently on today’s social media.

“I think there is a growing sense that a lack of any moral or legal responsibility about spreading hate or violence just doesn’t cut it,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA).  He’s the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Social media researcher Jonathan Albright has published a series of essays in recent days detailing the extent of the problem, calling disinformation in 2018 much more widespread and serious than in 2016.  “We’re even more behind,” Albright said in an interview. “The number of people trying to game the system has increased.”

And most of them, he added, are Americans.

Copyright G.Ater  2018