By Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff

A January 2023 publication from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) spawned the latest round of spin and shifting baselines from Russiagate apologists. Russiagate refers to the claims that Russia meddled in and influenced the outcome of the U.S. election in 2016, had direct connections to Donald Trump and his associates, and worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton for the presidency. A recent article from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, written by investigative reporter Jeff Gerth, utilized exiting media reports, and “dozens of people at the center of the story—editors and reporters, Trump himself, and others in his orbit,” to conclude that the legacy news media inaccurately covered the connection between Russia and Donald J. Trump during his Presidency. While this may be news to some diehard Democrats and their allies in the “liberal” press, the media’s reporting failures on the matter were not missed by all.

In addition to concluding Russiagate was a failure of the Fourth Estate, Gerth’s report reveals that rather than reckoning with their failures, many in the news media continue to avoid the topic altogether. Gerth explained that “my final concern, and frustration, was the lack of transparency by media organizations in responding to my questions. I reached out to more than sixty journalists; only about half responded.”

The authors of this article know firsthand how badly some outlets want to memory-hole media failures surrounding Russiagate. Just this year, we had an editor of a prominent online news site (where we have been published many times) refuse to publish one of our articles because it rightly pointed out, inconveniently, that journalists Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were accurate on many aspects of the Russiagate narrative, despite other criticisms and attacks the corporate media and the left have heaped upon them.

One of the most egregious responses to the additional revelations published by CJR about the collapse of Russiagate came from Andrew Prokop of Vox. Prokop misused the concept of “revisionism” to claim that Russiagate “deniers” (whom he primarily identified as Gerth, Greenwald, and Taibbi) were spreading a “revisionist history” about the news media reports on Trump and Russia. To set up his faulty argument, Prokop had no choice but to admit that the “Trump as Manchurian candidate” theories, and “anything based on the Steele dossier (the opposition research report on Trump that engendered much of the Russiagate speculation),” “have not aged well,” especially the infamous “pee tape” – a story claiming that Russia was blackmailing Trump with a recording of sex workers urinating on Trump. However, from there the article is an exercise in projection, straw-person arguments, cherry-picking, and shooting the messengers. While Prokop rightfully acknowledges some reporting errors in the past, he engages in revisionism of his own while moving the goalposts on the overall claims regarding Russia, Trump, the 2016 election, and the aftermath. 

Prokop creates a straw person argument by falsely claiming that critics ignore the origin of Russiagate so they can blame it all on Hillary Clinton. In fact, the very people Prokop refers to as “deniers” have confirmed the very same stories Prokop cites as the actual origin of Russigate: the social media posts from Russian sources, Trump’s personal attorney’s contacting the Russian government regarding a Trump Tower project in Moscow, and the Trump campaign’s decision to share publicly available polling data, as well as their interest in hacked Democratic emails and “dirt,” on then candidate Hillary Clinton.

In addition to misrepresenting Russiagate critics’ arguments, Prokop engages in an act of projection by accusing them of rewriting history. Citing a claim made by the U.S. Government in their indictment of individuals suspected of hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee’s [DNC] server, Prokop concludes that we know “the Russian government really did intervene in the 2016 election by hacking leading Democrats’ emails and having them leaked” to WikiLeaks. However, Prokop ignores a later declassified interview revealing that Crowdstrike, the American cybersecurity technology company that the government credits with proving that Russia hacked the DNC emails, admitted, under oath, to the House of Representatives’ Permentant Select Committee on Intelligence that “we did not have concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated (moved electronically) from the DNC [server].” Instead, all they had was “indicators.” Indeed, Crowdstrike reiterated this point on their website noting that they do not have “concrete evidence” that anyone “exfiltrated data and emails from the DNC network.” This indicates that any claim that Russia hacked the emails is infact doubtful if not baseless according to the available evidence, and far from as certain as Prokop would lead readers to believe. Indeed, several scholars, including the two of us and others at the media watchdog Project Censored, have acknowledged that Russia did in fact interfere, but with little discernable impact.

Worse, Prokop’s inaccurate historical narrative assumes that the Russiagate nonsense stopped with the Steele Dossier and Manchurian candidate narratives in 2016, and any other questionable stories or narratives were responsibly introduced by the news media, but may have worked to create a misleading narrative. He explains this conclusion by noting “media coverage that is accurate and even arguably justified can create an unfair or misleading narrative, due less to the facts than to proportion, hype, tone, and implication.” This is the real attempt at revisionist history, from the legacy press and their apologists who keep spinning the story, and the root of a larger problem. Censoring those who challenged that narrative not for ideological reasons, but for journalistic ones.

First, media companies actively tried to censor authors criticizing Russiagate. Taibbi noted that there were attempts by Rolling Stone to stymie his Russian criticism. Indeed, Taibbi and Greenwald, both of whom had consistently appeared in major news media outlets, stopped being invited as guests once they questioned the Russiagate narrative. We even experienced this firsthand as in 2018, we had to fight to even raise legitimate questions about Russiagate for a writing project with one of our publishers. Among the liberal class, even asking basic questions about the evil Trump/Putin axis was akin to heresy (and just for the record, we oppose them both).

Second, while Prokop fairly mentions that some major media outlets debunked a few Russiagate stories, he ignores the litany of false or baseless stories the legacy news media propounded and perpetuated long after the election. These include, but are not limited to:

• Russia hacking a Vermont power plant;
• Russia putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan
• Russia shifting election outcomes around the world;
• Trump was as Russian an asset since 1987;
• Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s Report sought to communicate that there was a Trump-Russia connection without saying there was a Trump-Russia connection;
• “The walls were closing in on Trump”;
• RT hacked into and took over C-SPAN;
• PropOrNot identified hundreds of websites controlled by Russia;
• Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci was Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund under Senate investigation;
• Russia attacked U.S. “Diplomats” at Cuban Embassy with Havana Syndrome;
• Trump had a secret internet server to communicate with a Russian bank;
• Former Trump presidential campaign chair Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange three times in the Ecuadorian Embassy;
• Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller possessed emails and interviews confirming that Trump directed his lawyer to lie to Congress;
• Donald Trump Jr. was offered advanced access to the WikiLeaks email archive;
• 17 U.S. intelligence agencies definitively concluded that 2016 cyberattacks derived from the “highest levels of the Kremlin”;
• Russia created the Hunter Biden laptop story as fake news.

Prokop’s analysis is problematic because it conflates journalism with legal inquiries. He justifies the continued Russiagate reporting by noting that there were suspicious statements, actions, and associations that hinted at a Trump-Russia connection (which we even wrote about in a previous book). Even if this is true, this demonstrates a grammar school level understanding of journalism. Legal officials may, and did, investigate the connection, but the press acted as if a connection was already known and they – along with Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller – were just in the process of finding it. They did not find any prosecutable smoking gun, nor did they report on alterative motives or interpretations because they believed the Russiagate narrative so strongly that they tailored all reporting to confirm their bias that Russiagate was real.

Their fixation on the Russiagate narrative may have been motivated in part by careerism. Indeed, major Russiagaters like Nina Jankowicz received a prestigious position as the head of now defunct Department of Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board and Rachel Maddow took home a $30 million contract mostly for spreading Russiaphobia, and turning Russiagate into a cottage industry at MSNBC.

Conversely, those who criticized (not denied, criticized) the Russigate narrative repeatedly experienced personal attacks to silence their reporting. For example, reports came out that Taibbi was a former drug user, misogynist, and a “conservative” (which WAPO used as a pejorative term). Prokop also engaged in ad hominem attacks to undermine the credibility of Gerth’s analysis for CJR by pointing out errors in his previous reporting. However, this fallacious attack does little to demonstrate any inaccuracy in Gerth’s current analysis or the topic at hand. We learn in Journalism 101 that news outlets make errors, but to gain credibility they own up to them, they do not revise history. This is why news outlets tell audiences about corrections, and so-called mainstream journalists such as Michael Isikoff admitted that media reports were less than accurate on Russiagate. That is how one builds credibility. The opposite approach would be to hide errors or biased reporting, like the Washington Post did when it stealthily removed its claims that Taibbi was a “conservative.”

More importantly, it is fallacious to assume that if a journalist makes one mistake, then everything they report is false. Prokop must know this firsthand as he claimed in 2015 that Trump’s candidacy would be good for Jeb Bush. Instead, Trump won the presidency, Bush gained no notable support from voters, and was forced to drop out of the race in February 2016. Prokop’s embarrassing miscalculation is no reason to discount everything he reports. Indeed, it illustrates that all reporting needs to be evaluated on its merits, not by attacking an author for some previous error. Good journalism does not need to keep changing or back-peddling claims to fit a pre-ordained conclusion, it just needs to follow the facts wherever they may lead. For Russiagate, maybe it’s time we relegate it to the dustbin of history, and stymie any reprise of such revisionist propaganda.

The post From Russiagate with Love: Corporate Media Spin and Revisionist Reporting on Russia’s Alleged Meddling in the 2016 Election Continue appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Project Censored.

Project Censored is pleased to publish the first long-form article in our “Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics” column. Authored by Andy Lee Roth, Avram Anderson, and Mickey Huff, the piece draws heavily from a chapter they contributed to the forthcoming book, Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, edited by Robin Andersen, Nolan Higdon, and Steve Macek (Peter Lang). In this inaugural long-form piece, the authors take a deep dive into censorship by proxy, how it operates in contemporary American media, and what it means for media consumers. As we continue to develop our “Dispatches” column, we will include additional long-form pieces that offer in-depth reporting on the state of American media and how it intersects with politics.

Defining “Censorship by Proxy”

Online restrictions—including content moderation, advertising blocklists, and enforcement of “community standards,”implemented by Big Tech platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook—increasingly combine with government legislation to yield dangerous, but submerged threats to online freedom of information, not to mention the offline safety historically-oppressed or marginalized groups.

Censorship has typically been treated as a matter of government control, with emphases in the United States on the role of the First Amendment and a host of legal precedents that establish limits on “prior restraint” by government. However, the rise of digital-era media giants—including Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube), Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), and Twitter—makes clear that media corporations now stand alongside government as commanding arbiters of legitimate discourse on public issues. “Google may not be a country, but it is a superpower,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Though Google, Facebook, Twitter and other media entities lack the formal legal authority of sovereign nation-states, “their capacity to enable or limit freedom of information and expression is greater than that of most states.”

We explore these significant changes in the media landscape by developing the concept of censorship by proxy, which we define as restrictions on freedom of information 1) undertaken by private corporations, which 2) exceed the usual legal limits on governmental censorship, and 3) serve both corporate and government or third-party interests.

The Example of RT America

As an example of censorship by proxy, consider the demise of RT America, also known as Russia Today, which from 2010 until 2022 served as the US-based channel of the global, multilingual RT news network funded by the Russian government. On March 3, 2022, after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and amidst a popular wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the United States, RT America shut down. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who hosted “On Contact” on RT America, wrote, “This was long the plan of the US government.”

But, in fact, it was not the US government that shut down RT America. Instead, DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV and Dish—all corporate entities—effectively censored RT America by deplatforming the channel: On March 1, 2022, DirecTV dropped RT America from its services; the following day, Roku did the same; and, on March 4, Sling TV and its parent company Dish removed RT America their platforms.

But Hedges’ analysis of the US government’s aims was not off-target. Well before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the US government had placed restrictions on RT America and journalists working for it. In November 2017, facing legal pressure from the US Department of Justice, RT America had registered as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Although RT America, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera, and several Chinese state media outlets have been required to register under FARA, the BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, and Canada’s CBC have not, leading some critics to suggest that the designation “has more to do with geopolitics than with journalism.”

An intelligence assessment spurred the Justice Department’s pressure to register RT under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. A now-declassified January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concluded that “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” contributed to the Russian “influence campaign” to swing the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. According to the ICA—which combined analyses by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA—RT America’s programing highlighted “criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties” and was an important “messaging tool” in the “Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US government and fuel political protest.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists criticized the Justice Department for forcing RT to register as a foreign agent, describing this as a “shift in how the law has been applied in recent decades” and “a bad idea” that empowered governments to decide “what constitutes journalism or propaganda.” Journalists at registered outlets stated that “the stigma attached with registering” compromised their ability “to carry out normal journalistic activities,” the CPJ reported subsequently.

The US government could have silenced RT America outright, but doing so would have prompted negative repercussions. An overt government decision to censor RT America would likely have generated not only widespread domestic criticism of the action as a violation of constitutionally-protected press freedoms, but also Russian blowback in the form of retaliation in kind against US-based news organizations operating in Russia.

Instead, the decisions of a handful of US-based media service providers achieved the same end without any of the domestic or international political costs. This case exemplifies the phenomenon we describe as censorship by proxy. Because censorship by proxy can occur wherever the interests and powers of global corporations and national governments intersect, it is an international phenomenon.

Returning to the case of RT America, note that, in addition to the groundwork laid by the Justice Department’s designation of the broadcaster and its journalists as registered “foreign agents,” the marked rise in anti-Russian public opinion following the Russian invasion of Ukraine also contributed to the news channel’s demise. DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV, and Dish each decided to drop RT America from their platforms in protest against the Russian invasion, and likely in response to public campaigns urging them to do so. The corporate deplatforming of RT America should be understood not only as a case of censorship by proxy, but also as a product of a “moral panic” in which the Russian news channel was cast as a “folk devil” and the media service providers that deplatformed it positioned themselves as defenders of established values.

Moral Panics Prompt Censorship by Proxy

Informed by pioneering studies in the sociology of deviance by Howard Becker, Stanley Cohen, and Stuart Hall, social scientists, media scholars use the term “moral panic” to describe social fears based on the belief that a stereotyped group or category of people threatens the values, safety, or interests of a community. These stereotypes often center on identities marginalized within the community or wider society, including, for example, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nationality, religion, or class.

Despite the concept’s wording, moral panics are usually about politics as much as morality. This is especially so in contexts of social, political, or economic tension, when the manufacture of moral panic is useful because it can quickly and effectively produce social solidarity. Moral panics can rapidly convert outrage into political action. Notably, however, studies on a diverse range of moral panics, from the Salem witch trials in the 17th century to the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrate that political action in response to moral panics often serves to reinforce and expand the authority of groups already holding power.

Our analysis shows how practitioners of censorship by proxy often participate in the construction or amplification of moral panics to justify restrictions on freedom of information. Political leaders and Big Tech platforms alike champion online safety—often with paternalistic calls to protect women and children—in the name of “cleaning up” online spaces, but the measures they propose often serve to muzzle legitimate political dissent, further marginalize already vulnerable communities, and divide members of the public by pitting, for example, the safety of children against freedom of information.

How Censorship by Proxy Works: Content Moderation, Community Standards, and Advertising Blocklists

Online censorship has been made more palatable through rebranding as “content moderation” or enforcement of “community standards,” undertaken by corporations as much as government agencies. Content moderation often leads to innocent content being flagged as harmful or explicit, which leads to the silencing of marginalized voices. Here we focus especially on LGBTQ+ content, but, under the guise of countering “fake news,” censorship by proxy also restricts progressive independent news outlets that depend on major media platforms for content distribution, advertising revenue, and fundraising.

From Facebook to YouTube, the biggest social media platforms all engage in forms of content blocking that negatively impact LGBTQ people and communities. Due to a double-standard, the same algorithms that ban LGBTQ-themed hashtags and demonetize YouTube channels with LGBTQ content often permit or even promote homophobic and transphobic content. No overarching policy, much less any kind of government directive leads to these outcomes; instead, the marginalization or erasure of queer content online is a case of censorship by proxy that reflects—and reinforces—moral panic orchestrated by the religious right and embraced by many Republican politicians, as Katherine Stewart documented in The Power Worshippers.

Under the guise of addressing hate speech, Facebook has applied strict real-name policies that prevent transgender people from using their chosen names and identities, blocked advertising with LGBTQ content or themes, while instituting criteria for “protected” and “unprotected” categories that promote homophobic and transphobic content. To moderate “adult” content, Instagram has deplatformed users, banned hashtags, and shadow-banned posts and ads with LGBTQ content. In efforts to manage bullying or harassment based on users’ “physical or mental condition,” TikTok has implemented moderation guidelines that outlaw LGBTQ content.  Twitter has implemented bans on “sensitive media” terms that restrict efforts by LGBTQ people to reclaim and take pride in slurs, because content moderation processes often disregard the poster’s intent. In January 2021, a federal judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against YouTube, filed by LGBT content creators, who claimed that the video sharing platform had violated their First Amendment rights by censoring their content and demonetizing their channels. US District Court Magistrate Virginia DeMarchi ruled that, as private entities, YouTube and its parent company, Google, were not bound by the First Amendment, a ruling that received nearly no news coverage.

Advertising Interests Drive Censorship by Proxy

In a new wrinkle on how advertising interests shape the production and distribution of online content, advertisers now use “blocklists” to avoid having their products associated with content that they believe might damage their brands’ reputations with target consumers. The advertising blocklists employed by many prominent corporations to promote “brand safety” now employ artificial intelligence technology to scan for as many as 7,000 different words and phrases.

A 2019 study by CHEQ, a cybersecurity business, found that “more than half (57%) of neutral or positive stories on major news sites are being incorrectly flagged as unsafe for advertising.” The impact of blocklists was most pronounced on LGBTQ-focused news outlets: 73 percent of the safe content in The Advocate and PinkNews was inappropriately flagged as unsafe for advertising, CHEQ found. The editor of PinkNews, Benjamin Cohen, told CHEQ that a lot of content gets blocked “for no legitimate reason.” Ad networks are “blocking content for the word ‘lesbian’ because they lazily think lesbian equals porn,” Cohen explained.

Deprived of precious advertising revenue, LGBTQ+ media outlets become even more vulnerable to cuts, layoffs, and closures. Brand safety based on blocking keywords is “hurting minority voices, such as LGBT communities,” CHEQ concluded. Jerry Daykin, an ad exec and LGBTQ+ advocate, put it even more starkly, telling CHEQ, without more careful consideration of how advertising blocklists work, “We’ll continue to see minority voices squeezed out of media.”

The EARN IT Act

To clarify the potential scope of censorship by proxy, consider the EARN IT Act, introduced by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in early 2022. The bill proposes to establish a national commission to “develop best practices for interactive computer services providers (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) to prevent, reduce, and respond to the online sexual exploitation of children,” and also limits “the liability protections of interactive computer service providers with respect to claims alleging violations of child sexual exploitation laws.” The EARN IT Act would severely weaken Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity from prosecution to electronic service providers for most user-posted content, a provision the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cites as “the most important law protecting internet speech.”

The 2022 EARN IT Act revived a 2020 version of the legislation, which lawmakers had dropped after it was strongly opposed by a number of organizations that promote press freedoms and digital rights, including EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Article 19, and Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. Both versions of the EARN IT Act build on a 2018 federal law known as FOSTA-SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). FOSTA-CESTA established an exception to Section 230, making online platforms legally liable for third-party content that promotes sex trafficking. As numerous critics have noted, FOSTA-SESTA has chilled online speech and restricted privacy rights in ways that disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ people, sex workers, and others who depend on internet privacy. FOSTA-SESTA led to the closure of Craigslist personals, the gutting of Tumblr after it banned all “adult” content, and new restrictions on Instagram, consequences that only begin to foreshadow the potential impacts of the 2022 EARN IT Act.

While affirming the importance of curbing “the scourge of child exploitation online,” in February 2022, Article 19 and 48 additional organizations— including the American Civil Liberties Union, the EFF, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and PEN America—sent an open letter to the US Senate, opposing the EARN IT Act on the grounds that it “will actually make it harder for law enforcement to protect children. It will also result in online censorship that will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and will jeopardize access to encrypted services.”

Opponents of the EARN IT Act foresee a dramatic expansion of liability under state laws if the EARN IT Act revokes the protections afforded service providers by Section 230, a watershed change that would lead service providers to engage in overbroad censorship of online speech. As Article 19’s open letter to the US Senate noted, these chilling effects would especially restrict “content created by diverse communities, including LGBTQ individuals, whose posts are disproportionately labeled erroneously as sexually explicit.”

Critics of the EARN IT Act also decry it as a Trojan horse effort to erode end-to-end encryption, which helps internet users—including journalists, activists, and members of marginalized communities—keep their online data and communications private and secure. Online services would be likely to stop using end-to-end encryption because it is also considered a “red flag” for law enforcement officials investigating online child sex-abuse materials (CSAM). Although end-to-end encryption protects the freedom of expression and privacy of all internet users, it is especially important for members of LGBTQ+ communities. As LGBT Tech and the Internet Society have noted, strong encryption provides privacy for LGBTQ+ people while coming out and connecting, and it empowers transgender people “to safely use the Internet to find doctors and treatment during transitions.”

Outside the United States, other nations have enacted or are pursuing similar laws. In January 2022, Australia enacted its Online Safety Act. According to the government, the law strengthens previous cyberbullying protections for children and adults and authorizes the nation’s eSafety Commissioner to “get the ‘worst of the worst’ content removed no matter where it’s hosted.” In March 2022, the Australian news site Junkee reported that the law’s “overly broad take-down powers” are threatening queer online spaces and “silencing LGBTIQ culture.” Comparable legislation, the Online Safety Bill, is under review in the United Kingdom, and subject to similar criticisms.

Online Restrictions and Offline Repercussions

Some worst-case consequences of what US legislation such as the EARN IT might lead to can be appreciated by reviewing the chilling effects of Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda law.”

In 2011, Russia established a federal law that restricted the distribution of “harmful” material among minors, including information that depicted violence, illegal activities, substance abuse, self-harm, or that might “elicit fear, horror, or panic in children.” After subsequent revisions to the law, in 2012 and 2013, legislation first enacted as a content rating system morphed into a sweeping law that criminalizes “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” as a class of harmful content. As the Guardian reported at the time, the 2013 law “stigmatizes gay people and bans giving children any information about homosexuality.” In 2018, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report that analyzed Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law as “a classic example of political homophobia,” which “targets vulnerable sexual and gender minorities for political gain.” Based on in-depth interviews with sexual and gender minority youth and mental health providers and social workers in Russia, HRW found that the law not only limits sexuality education, but also has been used to shut down online information and mental health referrals for youth, exacerbated hostility toward LGBT people, and had a chilling effect on mental health professionals and others who work with LGBT youth.

Although there has been global protest against Russia’s anti-LGBTQ policies, especially during the leadups to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the Russian-hosted 2018 World Cup, much less attention has been focused on the role of the religious right in the United States in creating Russia’s anti-gay movement. As Mother Jones reported in February 2014, Russians have “adopted the kind of language the American religious right has long deployed to fight acceptance of homosexuality”—including terms such as “natural family,” “traditional values,” and “protecting children.”

This was the result, Mother Jones reported, of the direct influence of the Illinois-based World Congress of Families, an umbrella organization for many of the most influential religious right groups in the US. “The rise of anti-gay laws in Russia has mirrored, almost perfectly, the rise of WCF’s work in the country,” Mother Jones reported in 2014. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the WCF as a designated hate group, based on its anti-LGBTQ ideology:

Though its origins are in the American Christian Right, the WCF has built a web of influence in different countries, providing a point of networking for global anti-LGBT forces… Its legacy includes the mainstreaming of the so-called “natural family” doctrine, one that has been used to curtail LGBT and reproductive rights across the world.

The channels of influence between anti-LBGTQ interests in the United States and Russia run in both directions. As Mother Jones reported in 2014, “elements of the US religious right have come to see Russia as a redoubt in a global battle against homosexuality.”

Inspired though it may by the Russian model, the crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States has developed through different channels. In Russia, the national government has spearheaded the crackdown; in the United States, media giants and state governments, spurred by anti-LGBT groups such as Project Blitz, have acted in concert to provide the one-two punch necessary to create what even establishment news outlets have reported as an “unprecedented” wave and “historic tally” of anti-LGBTQ legislation, as monitored by Blitz Watch. These dynamics exemplify a more complex and subtle variation of censorship by proxy.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to consider gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents child abuse; in Florida, Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms and requires any instruction on those topics to be age-appropriate and in accordance with state standards. Across the United States, educational gag orders—including 15 legislative bills in nine states and “sweeping book bans”—target speech about LGBTQ+ identities, PEN America reported in February 2022.

These legislative efforts dovetail with restrictions on LGBTQ+ content online, including content moderation, community standards, and advertising blocklists administered by corporate platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as described in earlier sections of this article. From online content restrictions to offline curriculum regulations and other forms of exclusionary legislation, the United States is at risk of rivaling Russia in silencing LGBTQ+ voices and marginalizing LGBTQ+ identities.

Three Strategies to Counter Censorship by Proxy

The ability to censor is not limited to government agencies. Instead, corporate entities—including especially media giants such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—exert profound influence on our channels of communication, controlling what members of the public are most likely to see—and what content and perspectives those audiences are unlikely to ever to come across, unless they actively seek them out.

In the hope of spurring engagement with these concerns, we conclude with a brief overview of three possible remedies to online censorship by proxy.

First, Design from the Margins (DFM) offers one promising approach for developing technology, apps, and online platforms that protect historically oppressed or marginalized groups. Developed by Afsaneh Rigot, a researcher affiliated with Article 19 and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, DFM originated from an effort to counter what Rigot has described as the “weaponization of social media, messenger, and dating apps.” By contrast, when technology is designed from the onset with the vulnerabilities of oppressed and marginalized users in mind, all users benefit from greater security. Rigot’s research has already led to significant improvements in the design of dating apps used by LGBTQ+ people in countries where authorities and non-state actors regularly target members of LGBTQ+ communities.

Second, we ought to think creatively about how DFM principles might apply to media more broadly. There are promising overlaps between DFM and a number of the guidelines for ethical journalism advocated by the Society of Professional Journalists. Under the basic guideline, “Seek Truth and Report It,” for example, the SPJ includes guidance to avoid stereotypes, to label advocacy as such, and to support “the open and civil exchange of views,” even when those views might be deemed “repugnant” by some. A full discussion of the crossover between these principles of ethical journalism and a Design from the Margins approach goes beyond the scope of this concluding discussion. But, for now, we note that content moderation, community standards, and advertising guidelines, would likely look rather different in the future than they do now, if DFM principles served as foundations, rather than afterthoughts. Similarly, strong encryption—imperiled by legislation such as the EARN IT Act—protects vulnerable groups subject to systemic discrimination.

US policy decisions will affect not only US users but also set precedents around the world. Those concerned with opposing global crackdowns on freedom of information and expression should lend their support to efforts to preserve end-to-end encryption online.

Third and finally, critical media literacy—as championed by organizations such as Project Censored, the Critical Media Project, and the Propwatch Project, to name only a few—can help to raise public awareness about the extent of censorship by proxy, and to defuse the power of moral panics. Censorship is most powerful when it is invisible; moral panic is most inflammatory when heightened anxieties make it easier to draw conclusions that might be counter to logic. Informed by the basic principles of critical media literacy, members of the public are more likely to recognize censorship by proxy and less likely to be irrationally swayed by moral panic.

Andy Lee Roth is a sociologist and associate director of Project Censored. He is coeditor, with Mickey Huff, of Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023, and a member of the Media Revolution Collective that wrote The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media LIteracy for Young People.

Avram Anderson is an electronic resources management specialist at California State University, Northridge, and a member and advocate of the LGBTQI+ community researching LGBTQI+ censorship, in print and online. In addition to coauthoring The Media and Me, they also serve on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored, coeditor of the Censored yearbook series, and coauthor of United States of Distraction, Let’s Agree to Disagree, and The Media and Me. Huff teaches social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College, and serves as executive producer and cohost of The Project Censored Show, the Project’s nationally syndicated public affairs program.

The post Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Project Censored.

By Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler

ChatGPT has sent shockwaves through higher education, creating a moral panic about the threat that artificial intelligence (AI) poses to the classroom. As critical media literacy scholars, we are not panicking, and we do not think any educator should. Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chat bot released in late 2022. Industry insiders were amazed by the technology, with Microsoft quickly moving to integrate OpenAI features into its products.

Among other functions, ChatGPT, currently offered as a free research preview, can write well-formulated essays on a series of topics. According to Inside Higher Ed, students are using it to generate outlines, bibliographies, and tutoring concepts. Meanwhile, educators are confirming cheating rings composed of students using ChatGPT. The ubiquity and effectiveness of ChatGPT has “alarmed” universities and led many professors to alter their syllabus and pedagogical approach.

Much of the reports on ChatGPT serve to foster panic. For example, the New York Times warned that ChatGPT “hijacks democracy,” and Arab News claimed it will “deepen the disinformation crisis.” The reporting also suffers from a disaster movie-like understanding of AI, where the programs become sentient and overtake humanity and free will. In Machine Unintelligence, computer scientist Meredith Broussard reminds us that the autonomous AI popularized by films was abandoned by serious researchers decades ago. Indeed, Gary Smith refers to the public’s continued faith in the development of the film version of AI “The AI Delusion.”

To quell the panic, it behooves us to remember that the machine learning possible today is dictated by human created algorithms. It is humans, not autonomous machines, who set the parameters for what AI can and cannot do. Digital technologies are not autonomous actors free from human influence and they are certainly not sentient. Rather, they are designed by humans and thus reflect and communicate the various biases, values, and self-serving interests of their creators.

A critical media literacy lens reminds us that, rather than fret over academic dishonesty, it is more worthwhile to investigate what goes into building ChatGPT: The human element reveals the values of the larger society, including adherence to racism, sexism, and classism. For example, in 2022 when asked “whether a person should be tortured,” ChatGPT responded to yes if they’re from North Korea, Syria, or Iran. The xenophobic and jingoistic response illustrates how AI technology such as ChatGPT recreates the bias of its human creator. Furthermore, it threatens to compound class inequities by serving privileged students who can access the fast computer and high-speed internet necessary to utilize ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is simply the latest tool in the the century’s long saga of academic dishonesty. While there are certainly instances where students cheat simply for the sake of cheating, students are more often driven to cheat when backed into a corner. For example, the contradiction of finding no time to study because they need to work in order to pay for college or the pressure of maintain a high GPA because that appears to be the route to professional and financial success, post-graduation.

There are those who believe more tech is the solution, and have turned to a Princeton student generated app that claims to be able to determine if ChatGPT wrote a particular essay. Using technology to determine the veracity of technology may be helpful, but it leaves out the process of critical analysis of said technology.

Our solution, and one way to dampen the moral panic, is for teachers to take a critical media literacy approach and bring ChatGPT in the classroom so that students can understand the threats and benefits it poses to their learning. ChatGPT presents a unique opportunity for teachers and students to build knowledge together; because the technology and its applications are brand-new to all of us, this is an opportunity to co-create understanding and, in working together, we may dampen both the fascination with the tech as well as the desire to use it for nefarious purposes. Utilizing the skills of critical inquiry fostered by critical media literacy, teachers and students can work together to analyze assignments. This may include presentations on their papers, the development of in-class outlines prior to writing, or a simple conversation about the content and structure of the assigned work. Such lessons serve two purposes: give students an opportunity to sharpen their understanding and provide educators with an opportunity to test students’ depth of knowledge about the essay they claim to have written.

It is incumbent on educators to communicate to students the benefits and threats posed by the utilization of technology. As teachers, we know that to write well is to think well. While teaching our students this, we can also remind them that, while it is possible to attain a degree in higher education without attaining the broader knowledge linked to one’s own ability to think and write critically; students who use ChatGPT or engage in similar forms of academic dishonesty position themselves to achieve none of these indispensable life skills. Employing ChatGPT may provide one a pathway to a job that is quickly lost once the employer realizes they lack basic skills, thus, putting themselves in a position where they cannot pay the loans for the education they chose not to receive.

We argue that ChatGPT is not something that educators should panic over, instead they should do what they have always done: Adapt to educate the citizens of an ever changing society. Cheating is nothing new, but how those in education make sense of cheating may need revision.

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By Nolan Higdon

The increasing shift to remote work in higher education has threatened the power and influence of the professional managerial class (PMC). In response, the PMC are throwing everything at the wall from baseless claims about work productivity to coercive policies to cement their power over faculty. Coined by John and Barbara Ehrenreich, the PMC are an influential cultural group who hold advanced degrees, are considered experts, manage other people and their wealth, and shape dominant culture and public policy.

The proliferation of the PMC in higher education resulted from the shift to neoliberal managerialism in the 1970s which sought to maximize efficiency by entrenching corporate structures and competitive meritocratic processes in higher education. From 1993 to 2009, there was a 60% increase in administrative positions in higher education. As a result, many institutions spend more on administration, student services, and academic support than on instruction. The administrative bloat has negatively impacted students in two critical ways: increased tuition and instruction from overworked and underpaid faculty.

Much has been written about how the PMC’s approach to higher education has led to outlandish increases in tuition. For example, by the mid-20^th century states like California were offering free tuition for its residents. Between 2004 to 2013, the tuition of California universities doubled. Between 2002-2022, there was a 175% national increase in in-state tuition costs for public universities.

However, less attention has been paid to the other impacts neoliberal managerialism has had on students and the classroom: the development of an apartheid system of faculty. There are two groups of faculty in higher education. The first group—tenured/tenure-track (TT) faculty, derive security, salary, and benefits, while the other type of faculty, known as non-tenured part-time (NTPT) faculty, also known as adjunct, do not. NTPT faculty, which are disproportionately women and people of color, experience precarity, low wages, poverty, and a dearth of benefits. Given that NTPT faculty positions are cheaper for school budgets, the PMC reduced TT positions and increased NTPT from one-third of all faculty in the 1980s to two-thirds by 2021.

Many NTPT faculty exhaust themselves commuting between multiple campuses to try to string together a living. One instructor reported that they taught 16-hour days—80-hour weeks—on seven campuses for 25 years. My recent peer-reviewed study found that when queried if they would recommend a career in higher education to students, NTPT responded in the negative: “No. I actively discourage it,” “Absolutely not—why waste time and money until you finally learn what’s going on & become disillusioned?,” “Not unless you recognize that you will be underpaid and under-appreciated,” “NO. It is a long slog to get a PhD and even then the job scarcity and precariousness,” “Fuck no,” “NO, NO!!,” “No. The future is even more contingency and I would not recommend this path to others,” and “HELL NO.” Rather than sympathize or support them, NTPT faculty report that their PMC and TT colleagues are “abusive,” “ruthless,” “exploitative,” “oppressive,” “aloof,” “removed” and “entitled slackers.”  An NTPT explained “some pity us, others are contemptuous of us, and some are our de facto employers.”

For many NTPT faculty, pandemic measures offered an opportunity to escape hustle culture, so they could rest, improve their mental health, and better serve their students. Furthermore, it gave them more time and opportunity to be involved in campus affairs given that meetings were remote. Indeed, studies have made clear that faculty and students overwhelmingly prefer for the majority of courses to be offered remotely. Almost three-fourths of students prefer to have online course offerings. After decades of educational rhetoric and studies about a “student centered classroom” and “student led campus,” one would think that the PMC would let students dictate course modalities, but they would be wrong.

Although studies showed that workers were more productive when they worked from home, survey data showed that managers believed that working remotely was decreasing workplace productivity. This cognitive dissonance in neoliberal managerialism is a response to pandemic measures revealing that the majority of PMC positions are what David Graeber referred to as “Bullshit jobs.” Bullshit jobs are pointless and psychologically destructive. A recent study titled “What’s that smell? Bullshit jobs in higher education” chronicles how administrative bloat engendered numerous bullshit jobs in higher education.

During the shelter in place, educators and their students were able to collaborate on a constructive learning environment, and the PMC had little or anything to do with the learning process. Indeed, even though the majority of their tuition goes to the PMC, ask the average student the name of their favorite administrator and you will probably receive a blank stare.

In higher education and private industry, the PMC recognized that their lack of purpose was exposed, and moved swiftly to force people back to the physical workplace where they continue their charade.

The return to campus is certainly motivated in part by higher education’s dependence on the revenue that comes from having students in-person – such as food, drink, housing and related campus purchases – to maintain administrator bloat. Regardless, the burden of returning to physical work, while the pandemic still raged through the Omicron and Delta variants, was on NTPT faculty. TT faculty have protections and rights to choose their modality, which poverty stricken NTPT faculty do not. As a result, at risk of their health, NTPT faculty, as the majority of faculty, were often the one’s returning campus. The PMC recognized their lack of power in forcing TT to work and that is why many threatened to further increase NTPT positions and reduce TT positions. In addition, the PMC has taken to threatening all faculty by abandoning remote meetings and creating policies that punish faculty by utilizing sick days if they do not attend the in-person meetings.

While there has been a series of labor actions in higher education more recently, the apartheid system of faculty continues to prevent faculty from uniting with each other, let alone students, to resist the managerial coercion.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

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The Washington Post’s coverage of a January 2023 study arguing that the post-2016 coverage of Russia election meddling may have been overblown, reveals a corrosive trend in legacy news media where the personalities and outlets that perpetuate inaccurate or false news are rewarded, and the truth-tellers who expose legacy media lies are marginalized and ostracized.

The Washington Post cited a newly published academic study from the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics that concluded there was no evidence that the content suspected of being generated from Russia meaningfully impacted voters in the 2016 election. The authors wrote “we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.” However, the Post was quick to point out that the study focused on Twitter and there was still the possibility that Russian content on other platforms such as Facebook (now Meta) could have tilted the election. However, there is no solid evidence to confirm such a claim and other previous studies by media scholars Emil Marmol and Lee Major, as well as Nolan Higdon of Project Censored, found Facebook’s reach was also minimal. They were not alone.

The study the Post referenced was hardly revelatory as even more researchers had drawn the same conclusion as early as 2016. Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler and his colleagues pointed out there was no empirical evidence that online content shifted electoral votes in 2016 and noted that cable news proved to be arguably far more influential. All of these studies found that the content from Russia was minimal in scope and influence when compared to the digital content disseminated by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s multi-million dollar presidential campaigns, which were further boosted by billions of dollars in free coverage from legacy media. Meanwhile, seasoned journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté noted the flimsy sources and baseless claims so-called “mainstream” media were relying on to convince audiences that Russia tilted the election. Rather than analyze these arguments, corporate media outlets just shot at the messengers.

Still, other researchers ignored these aforementioned studies and sources and relied on unsubstantiated evidence to make irrational claims that Russia was responsible for Trump’s electoral victory, often straining credulity. A study from Columbia University argued that data from betting markets “confirms” Russian trolls tilted the 2016 election. The authors argued that changes in betting markets around the holidays, when trolls presumably took a break from propagandizing to gamble, demonstrated that it was Russia who tilted the election. Equally absurd, historian Katherine Jamieson Hall argued that Russia influenced the news media cycle by releasing Hillary’s emails, which distracted from an Access Hollywood tape exposing Trump’s sexism and misogyny. Hall’s analysis seems to imply that Russian trolls dictate news media focus, not the seasoned editors and staff at these much-vaunted institutions.

When confronted with conflicting research, however, the legacy news media overwhelmingly chose to perpetuate the story that Trump’s Electoral College victory was due to Russian interference. For example, over a six week period in 2017, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow covered Russia more than all other stories combined, turning it into a cottage industry as we noted in our book, United States of Distraction. The pervasive coverage by Maddow and others in legacy media laid the groundwork to justify numerous other false and baseless stories that claimed Russia had put a bounty on U.S. soldiers, infiltrated Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, hacked a Vermont power plant, fabricated evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and utilized a video recording of Trump being urinated on a by a sex worker as blackmail. All this from the same media outlets warning the public about the spread of “fake news.”

Legacy media’s Russia nonsense not only misinformed audiences, it distracted from substantive investigations into the failures of Clinton’s campaign, the successes of Trump’s, and the ways in which the Democratic Party and FBI were actually some of the most powerful forces meddling in the 2016 election. Yes, Russia meddled, too, but to nowhere near the extent or effect according to the evidence.

While journalists who pointed out the vapid reporting on Russia were erased from legacy media when not being attacked (Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Abby Martin, and Aaron Maté), Russia fear-mongering luminaries such as Maddow secured a $30 million annual deal with MSNBC. Having truth-tellers removed to make more room for propagandists is not new; it is the norm for legacy media. For example, in the 1990s, when Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News exposed the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking, a story legacy media was reticent to report, they attacked Webb (who was “let go” by the newspaper) leading to the destruction of his career and end of his life. Similarly, those who perpetuated the lies connecting Iraq to 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and 2003 were rewarded with continued lucrative legacy media careers (Judith Miller, Thomas Friedman, and almost any news anchor on national network or cable news for that matter), while those who challenged them were ostracized as conspiracy theorists (Phil Donahue, Jessie Ventura, Michael Moore), even though the latter were correct. Further, the entire decade-long attack on Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, including CIA plans to assassinate him, is further evidence that those who dare to expose the corruption and lies of the U.S. Empire, including the failures of the Fourth Estate itself, will pay a heavy price.

Another consequence of all this is that it further makes audiences so ignorant about the existence of journalists outside legacy media that they either do not know about their reporting or disregard them altogether. For example, the revelations from the late 2022 and 2023 Twitter Files was largely dismissed by legacy news media and its audiences because it came from independent reporters outside the establishment press, like Matt Taibbi, who offered well-sourced evidence that disproved legacy media’s claims about topics around government collusion and censorship, Russiagate, and the COVID-19 pandemic response.

The result is that audiences are uninformed or ill-informed. That was made abundantly clear last year, when George Santos won a seat in the House of Representatives while lying about nearly everything–where he attended high school and college, his finances, being Jewish (saying he was Jew-ish), having employees shot at the Pulse night club, founding charities, and his relatives’ dying in the 9/11 attacks and the Holocaust. Although Santos ran in New York, a state known as the media capital of the world, the legacy media did not expose these lies until after the election and Santos was already taking office. This journalistic malpractice is especially concerning given that it was a small local newspaper, The North Shore Leader, that exposed Santos’s lies before the election, when it really mattered, but no one bothered to notice. Apparently, the legacy media, whose outlets refer to themselves as “the place of politics” and “the best political team on television,” never considered that politicians might lie to get into office. This is curious given that they were acutely aware of Trump’s thousands of falsehoods, but it’s easier to blame Santos, not themselves, for audiences’ ignorance about the waning veracity of newly elected congressman’s claims. This was a major failure of the establishment press, and another example of why we desperately need local, independent journalism dedicated to telling the truth.

What is clear is that even through the legacy news media may eventually get a story right, it takes too long and the damage they inflict by perpetuating falsehoods results in an uninformed and misinformed public. Rather than wait for the legacy media to utilize its massive resources, power, and access to get a story right, audiences would be wiser to turn to the journalists (Brihana Joy Grey, Lee Fang, Ken Klippenstein, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Abby Martin, Alan MacLeod, and Aaron Maté), and media organizations (like those highlighted by Project Censored) with a track record of getting things right. You can usually tell who they are because they do not appear in legacy media unless they are being attacked.

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