More Signal. Less Noise.

V3 | Issue 42 | 10.21.21

Content and channel restrictions in China. Domestic political influence operations. Disinformation blowback?

Summary

By the CyberWire staff

At a glance.

Content and channel restrictions in China.
Domestic political influence operations.
Disinformation blowback?

Chinese policy with respect to content and the platforms that deliver it.

LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary, has, the Wall Street Journal reports, shuttered its operations in China. The business-focused network was the last major American social platform to operate in China. “A significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China,” motivated the decision, LinkedIn said. It will replace its familiar service with a simple, non-interactive job board. WIRED sees the decision as amounting to the fall of one of the last major people-to-people bridges between China and the West.

Bloomberg reports that the Cyberspace Administration of China has "announced an approved list of some 1,300 domestic media outlets, social media accounts and government agencies, banning internet news providers from using anything else."

Specific kinds of content as well as platforms are also subject to restriction from Beijing. The BBC reports that Apple has been pressured to removed both Bible and Koran apps from its store. Apple frames the move as a matter of compliance with Chinese law.

How a domestic influence campaign may have functioned in the 2016 US elections.

Ars Technica describes a political influence campaign that ran in 2015 and 2016 to the general advantage of then-candidate Donald Trump. Ars, which has taken some pains to be transparent with respect to its sources, based its account on an interview with the marketing operator who says he ran the effort. For two years, he ran websites and Facebook groups that spread bogus stories, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. Under him was a dedicated team of writers and editors paid to produce deceptive content—from outright hoaxes to political propaganda."

The man who says he was one of the principal operators behind the campaign, Robert Willis, describes his motivation: "I hated the establishment, Republicans, and Democrats, and Hillary was the target because she was as establishment as it got and was the only candidate that was all but guaranteed to be running on the main ticket in the future 2016 cycle. If I were to choose a lesser evil at the time, it would have, without a doubt, been the Republican Party, since I had moved to the new city due to the Democrats literally destroying my previous home state. It felt like good revenge."

The discussion is an interesting description of a content farm. The key to the operation's success seems to have been the system of reinforcement and repetition, as if Wittgenstein's famous reductio from the Philosophical Investigations had come to govern public discourse: we're buying a second copy of a newspaper to assure ourselves that what we saw in the first copy was true. Again, Ars Technica has gone to unusual lengths, including some self-criticism, to show how the story was investigated and reported. They're particularly interested in explaining why what they've published isn't a "puff piece" on Mr. Willis, who, they say, clearly had a high opinion of how effective the network he built was. But the effects of repetition and amplification, and the importance of influencers, are lessons in content farming worth taking into account.

The risk of believing your own press releases (especially if you've faked them).

Russian scientific competition with the West (a competition with a long history that extends beyond the Sputnik program World Politics Review mentions) may be backfiring in the case of the national response to COVID-19. "Russia developed the first coronavirus vaccine, and it reopened its economy before many others. Now, however, as global deaths due to COVID-19 reach their lowest levels in a year, the trend is going in the opposite direction in Russia. In fact, the pandemic response has all but gone off the rails, with a record number of deaths, hospitals straining to keep up and, astonishingly, less than one third of the Russian population vaccinated," an essay in World Politics Review says. Some responsibility for the backsliding appears to lie with the unintended effect of the propaganda on a complex domestic audience.

Selected Reading

Attacks, Threats, and Vulnerabilities

“Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself (Ars Technica) He was hired to build a fake news op but now wants to put things right.

Opinion: Urban myths about economics have taken root — and the cost is high (Washington Post) Paul McCartney is dead! The feds want to tax emails to prop up the U.S. Postal Service! The moon landings were faked! Urban myths like these are mostly entertaining or annoying, and typically do no real harm. But when urban myths take root in economics — propelling a dubious theory or faulty analysis into a widely held belief about an important issue — it can lead policymakers to draw incorrect conclusions with costly consequences.

Russia’s ‘Post-Truth’ Approach to the Pandemic Has Backfired (World Politics Review) In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Russian officials seemed to delight in pointing to the country’s relatively low COVID-19 death toll and highlighting what they portrayed as a disastrous response by the West. Now, however, Russia’s pandemic response has all but gone off the rails. What happened?

Opinion: A bestselling female author was revealed to be three men. The episode tells a deeper story. (Washington Post) In 2018, a dark thriller called “The Gypsy Bride” was published in Spain. It told the story of two sisters tortured to death, and the subsequent investigation by the smartest and most peculiar woman in the police department. The novel kick-started a bestselling three-book series that has sold around 400,000 copies so far and been translated into nearly a dozen languages.

Marketplace

Facebook Is Rebuked by Oversight Board Over Transparency on Treatment of Prominent Users (Wall Street Journal) The board said the company hadn’t been forthcoming about how it exempts high-profile users from its rules and that it is drafting recommendations for how to overhaul the system, following a WSJ investigation.

Facebook's Fall From Grace Looks a Lot Like Ford's (Wired) Before there was Big Tech, there were auto companies that prioritized profits over safety—until a leaked memo made it clear regulation was the only cure.

The Facebook Whistleblower Won’t Change Anything (Wired) Whistleblowing has turned into a secular form of confession that keeps the limelight on one person instead of the movements already doing the work.

Microsoft Folds LinkedIn Social-Media Service in China (Wall Street Journal) LinkedIn’s plans to shut down the version of its professional-networking site used in the country mark the end of the last major American social-media service operating openly there.

Technologies, Techniques, and Standards

How Facebook Hides How Terrible It Is With Hate Speech (Wired) The company publicly claims its AI is amazing at removing harmful content, but internal documents suggest they know the algorithm is ineffective.

Mark Zuckerberg Isn't the Only One Who Failed Free Speech (WIRED) Almost exactly two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg took to the podium at Georgetown University and made a public plea for free expression. His vast public relations apparatus flagged the speech in advance, signaling that Facebook’s cofounder, CEO, and all-powerful czar would be speaking earnestly on an issue of importance.

How Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Gwyneth Paltrow Short-Circuit Your Ability to Think Rationally (Bloomberg) The sketchy rhetorical tricks of politicians, celebs, and con men—and how they work.

Opinion: Katie Couric ‘wanted to protect’ Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That wasn’t her job. (Washington Post) Gallup reported last week that Americans’ trust in media had dipped to its second-lowest mark on record. Now along comes Katie Couric, veteran TV anchor, with revelations likely to drop the mark yet further. As reported by DailyMail.com, Couric writes in her soon-to-be-released memoir that she protected late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from her own views on racial justice.

Design and Innovation

How to make a chatbot that isn’t racist or sexist (MIT Technology Review) Tools like GPT-3 are stunningly good, but they feed on the cesspits of the internet. How can we make them safe for the public to actually use?

Facebook Says AI Will Clean Up the Platform. Its Own Engineers Have Doubts. (Wall Street Journal) AI has only minimal success in removing hate speech, violent images and other problem content, according to internal company reports. It can’t consistently identify first-person shooting videos, racist rants or gruesome car crashes.

Facebook disputes report that its AI can’t detect hate speech or violence consistently (The Verge) It’s the latest report based on internal documents

Research and Development

Why you don’t really know what you know (MIT Technology Review) One of the world’s biggest science experiments shows why everybody needs to re-examine what it means to know something.

The long, complicated history of “people analytics” (MIT Technology Review) Silicon Valley’s belief that it can optimize society goes back a long way, as Jill Lepore argues in her new book “If Then.”

Legislation, Policy, and Regulation

The New Cold War (Foreign Affairs) America, China, and the echoes of history.

Containment Beyond the Cold War (Foreign Affairs) How Washington lost the post-Soviet peace.

The Kremlin’s Strange Victory (Foreign Affairs) How Putin exploits American dysfunction and fuels American decline.

China Cuts Caixin From Approved Media, Curbing Influence (Bloomberg) Cyberspace agency puts out list of approved media outlets. Beijing has proposed banning private capital from most media.

Republican and Democrat Lawmakers Step Up Efforts to Adopt Tougher Tech Laws (Wall Street Journal) Legislation to curb the influence of big technology companies, including putting new restrictions on online content, is starting to gain traction in Congress as lawmakers narrow their targets and seek to build on public attention.

A former top US election official urges sweeping security improvements, warning 'democracy is in trouble' (CyberScoop) The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s former lead election security official is recommending comprehensive changes to protect the ballot in future elections, from physical safety upgrades for election workers and federal agency revamps to mandated disclosure of cyber incidents.

Zero Trust: How to Secure American Elections When the Losers Won’t Accept They Lost (Stanford Internet Observatory) In this report, we outline three exigent threats to election processes following the events of the 2020 general election. Then, we provide 11 targeted recommendations to best address these threats ...

How to Fix Facebook, Instagram and Social Media? Change the Defaults (Wall Street Journal) Default settings on Facebook, Instagram and other social-media apps keep you hooked on your feeds and sharing your personal data. A few changes could mean the difference between an addictive social-media experience and a healthy one.

Bible, Quran apps removed from Apple app store for China (Catholic News Agency) Under pressure from Chinese law, a digital Bible company has removed its app from Apple’s app store offerings in China while Apple itself has removed a Quran app from its China store at the request of Chinese officials.

Litigation, Investigation, and Law Enforcement

Facebook whistleblower eyes state AGs, expanding regulatory threat beyond Washington (Washington Post) Led by Connecticut, more than a dozen state attorneys general are asking Facebook for information related to Frances Haugen’s leaked documents.

LinkedIn’s Exit From China Cuts Another East-West Bridge (Wired) The Microsoft subsidiary had agreed in 2014 to censor content in China, but that apparently wasn’t enough for tougher government regulators.

Ex-intel official who created controversial Trump Russia dossier speaks out (CNN) Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, the man behind the "Steele Dossier" that claimed Russian officials held compromising information on former President Donald Trump, defended the claims made in the dossier in his first on-camera interview since it was revealed in 2017.

The toothlessness of the Hatch Act is on display again (Federal News Network) The Hatch Act should apply to everyone or no one, but the current loopholes for enforcement do no good, says Jeff Neal.

Five ways we can turn the tide against murderous terrorist ideologies (The Telegraph) In the wake of the fatal attack on Sir David Amess, we need a step change in efforts to stem the flow of new violent extremists