UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it

A University of Washington professor started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But she got dragged down a rabbit hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment.

Originally published March 29th, 2017 at 6:30 am | Updated March 30th, 2017 at 11:04 am

By Danny Westneat

It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange.

Too strange for a university professor to take seriously.

“There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for the bombing,” Starbird told me the other day in her office. “It was real tinfoil-hat stuff. So we ignored it.”

Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by “crisis actors” for political purposes.

“After every mass shooting, dozens of them, there would be these strange clusters of activity,” Starbird says. “It was so fringe we kind of laughed at it.

“That was a terrible mistake. We should have been studying it.”

Starbird is in the field of “crisis informatics,” or how information flows after a disaster. She got into it to see how social media might be used for the public good, such as to aid emergency responders.
Instead she’s gone down a dark rabbit hole, one that wends through the back warrens of the web and all the way up to the White House.

Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.

It features sites such as Infowars.com, hosted by informal President Donald Trump adviser Alex Jones, which has pushed a range of conspiracies, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a staged fake.

There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com. Starbird cataloged 81 of them, linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots.
Infowars.com alone is roughly equivalent in visitors and page views to the Chicago Tribune, according to Alexa.com, the web-traffic analysis firm.

“More people are dipping into this stuff than I ever imagined,” Starbird says.

Starbird is in the UW’s Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering — the study of the ways people and technology interact. Her team analyzed 58 million tweets sent after mass shootings during a 10-month period. They searched for terms such as “false flag” and “crisis actor,” web slang meaning a shooting is not what the government or the traditional media is reporting it to be.

It happens after every mass shooting or attack. If you search for “false flag” and “Westminster,” you’ll find thousands of results theorizing that last week’s attack outside British Parliament was staged (presumably to bring down Brexit, which makes no sense, but making sense is not a prerequisite).

Starbird’s insight was to map the digital connections between all this buzzing on Twitter with a conglomeration of websites. Then she analyzed the content of each site to try to answer the question: Just what is this alternative media ecosystem saying?

It isn’t a traditional left-right political axis, she found. There are right-wing sites like Danger & Play and left-wing sensationalizers such as The Free Thought Project. Some appear to be just trying to make money, while others are aggressively pushing political agendas.

The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism — deep suspicion of free trade, multinational business and global institutions.

“To be antiglobalist often included being anti-mainstream media, anti-immigration, anti-science, anti-U.S. government, and anti-European Union,” Starbird says.

So it was like the mind of Stephen Bannon, chief adviser to Trump, spilled across the back channels of the web.

Much of it was strangely pro-Russian, too — perhaps due to Russian twitter bots that bombarded social channels during the presidential campaign (a phenomenon that’s now part of the FBI investigation into the election, McClatchy reported last week).

The mainstream press periodically waded into this swamp, but it only backfired. Its occasional fact checks got circulated as further evidence: If the media is trying to debunk it, then the conspiracy must be true.

Starbird is publishing her paper as a sort of warning. The information networks we’ve built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor.

“Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’ ” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” Alex Jones, she says, is “a kind of prophet. There really is an information war for your mind. And we’re losing it.”

I sat dumbfounded for a time as she spooled through tweets in her database: an archive of endless, baseless speculation that nevertheless is evidence of a political revolution. It should be unnecessary to say, but real humans died in these shootings. How disgustingly cruel it is to the survivors to have the stories of those deaths altered and twisted for commercial or ideological ends.

Starbird sighed. “I used to be a techno-utopian. Now I can’t believe that I’m sitting here talking to you about all this.”

Update

Though I have been silent here, I have not been idle. I realized that digital records can be discredited or claimed to be manufactured due to how easily they can be modified. What cannot fall into this trap? Print media. So I started a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Reading through the paper each day, and selecting, cutting, and carefully gluing down each article I think is important takes a surprisingly long time. I do not have enough free hours to archive the same articles both on paper and digitally. So, this blog will now link and/or copy content that I do not have access to in print form. I may make a few exceptions here and there for critically important content, though.

The Purging

It begins.

First, criminalize and oust foreigners. Then silence dissenters. Dear gods, I'm scared.

ETA: I decided to copy & paste the full article text below.

Federal agents conduct immigration enforcement raids in at least six states

By Lisa Rein, Abigail Hauslohner and Sandhya Somashekhar By Lisa Rein, Abigail Hauslohner and Sandhya Somashekhar

U.S. immigration authorities arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least a half-dozen states this week in a series of raids that marked the first large-scale enforcement of President Trump’s Jan. 25 order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally.

Officials said the raids targeted known criminals, but they also netted some immigrants without criminal records, an apparent departure from similar enforcement waves during the Obama administration. Last month, Trump substantially broadened the scope of who the Department of Homeland Security can target to include those with minor offenses or no convictions at all.

Trump has pledged to deport as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

Immigration officials confirmed that agents this week raided homes and workplaces in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, the Los Angeles area, North Carolina and South Carolina, netting hundreds of people. But Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said they were part of “routine” immigration enforcement actions. ICE dislikes the term “raids,” and prefers to say authorities are conducting “targeted enforcement actions,” she said.

Christensen said the raids, which began Monday and ended Friday at noon, found undocumented immigrants from a dozen Latin American countries. “We’re talking about people who are threats to public safety or a threat to the integrity of the immigration system,” she said, noting that the majority of those detained were serious criminals, including some who were convicted of murder and domestic violence.

Immigration activists said the crackdown went beyond the six states DHS identified, and said they had also documented ICE raids of unusual intensity during the past two days in Florida, Kansas, Texas and Northern Virginia.

That undocumented immigrants with no criminal records were arrested and could potentially be deported sent a shock wave through immigrant communities nationwide amid concerns that the U.S. government could start going after law-abiding people.

“This is clearly the first wave of attacks under the Trump administration, and we know this isn’t going to be the only one,” Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, an immigrant youth organization, said Friday during a conference call with immigration advocates.

ICE agents in the Los Angeles area Thursday took a number of individuals into custody over the course of an hour, seizing them from their homes and on their way to work, activists said.

David Marin, ICE’s field director in the Los Angeles area, said in a conference call with reporters Friday that 75 percent of the approximately 160 people detained in the operation this week had felony convictions; the rest had misdemeanors or were in the United States illegally. Officials said Friday night that 37 of those detained in Los Angeles had been deported to Mexico.

“Dangerous criminals who should be deported are being released into our communities,” Marin said.

Spanish language radio stations and the local NPR affiliate in Los Angeles have been running public service announcements regarding the hourly “Know Your Rights” seminars the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles scheduled for Friday and Saturday. By the time the 4 p.m. group began Friday, more than 100 others had gathered at the group’s office in the Westlake neighborhood just outside downtown.

A video that circulated on social media Friday appeared to show ICE agents in Texas detaining people in an Austin shopping center parking lot. Immigration advocates also reported roadway checkpoints, where ICE appeared to be targeting immigrants for random ID checks, in North Carolina and in Austin. ICE officials denied that authorities used checkpoints during the operations.

“I’m getting lots of reports from my constituents about seeing ICE on the streets. Teachers in my district have contacted me — certain students didn’t come to school today because they’re afraid,” said Greg Casar, an Austin City Council member. “I talked to a constituent, a single mother, who had her door knocked on this morning by ICE.”

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) said he confirmed with ICE’s San Antonio office that the agency “has launched a targeted operation in South and Central Texas as part of Operation Cross Check.”

“I am asking ICE to clarify whether these individuals are in fact dangerous, violent threats to our communities, and not people who are here peacefully raising families and contributing to our state,” Castro said in a statement Friday night.

Hiba Ghalib, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said the ICE detentions were causing “mass confusion” in the immigrant community. She said she had heard reports of ICE agents going door-to-door in one largely Hispanic neighborhood, asking people to present their papers.
“People are panicking,” Ghalib said. “People are really, really scared.”

Immigration officials acknowledged that as a result of Trump’s executive order, authorities had cast a wider net than they would have last year.

The Trump administration is facing several legal challenges to his executive orders on immigration. On Thursday, the administration lost a court battle over a separate executive order to temporarily ban entry into the United States by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, as well as by refugees. The administration said Friday that it is considering raising the case to the Supreme Court.

Some activists in Austin and Los Angeles suggested that the raids might be retaliation for those cities’ “sanctuary city” policies. A government aide familiar with the raids said it is possible that the predominantly daytime operations — a departure from the Obama administration’s night raids — meant to “send a message to the community that the Trump deportation force is in effect.”

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group, said that the wave of detentions harks back to the George W. Bush administration, when workplace raids to sweep up all undocumented workers were common.

The Obama administration conducted a spate of raids and also pursued a more aggressive deportation policy than any previous president, sending more than 400,000 people back to their birth countries at the height of his deportations in 2012. The public outcry over the lengthy detentions and deportations of women, children and people with minor offenses led President Obama in his second term to prioritize convicted criminals for deportation.

Janell Ross in Los Angeles and Camille Pendley in Atlanta contributed to this report.

A Picture of the Current White House

The New York Times gathered information on the mood in the current White House by talking to Its staff. Some of it is miscellaneous anecdotes -- critics would call it merely gossip -- but the stories paint a vivid picture of what we already suspected. Buried in the article was a tidbit I had missed before:

"[...] Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban."

(Bolding, of course, is mine.) This is so alarming, I do not have words for it. Steve Bannon is clearly the power behind the plaster-and-spraypaint throne Trump built for himself. Watch him, News Media. More closely than even the pathetic, embarrassing president.

Link: Associated Press Fact Check: Trump claims on travel ban misleading, wrong

The whole article is good at teasing apart the half-truths of which career politicians are so fond. But here is a highlight. If anyone tries to tell you, "This isn't a Muslim ban there are other Muslim countries that aren't on the list!!!" drop this excerpt on them:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani recently told Fox News that Trump had asked him to create a plan for a Muslim ban that would meet legal tests. Giuliani said he ultimately made recommendations that focused on security and what countries posed security threats.

You can't get much more obvious than that. Whatever else I may think of him, I deeply appreciate Giuliani's bluntness in that moment.

While most people were busy yelling about the travel ban (myself included), Trump quietly gave Steve Bannon more power:

Trump took steps Saturday to begin restructuring the White House National Security Council, adding the senior adviser to the principals committee, which includes the secretaries of state and defense. At the same time, Trump said his director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would attend only when “issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed."

...Which will be almost never, I'm sure.

ETA Feb. 11, 2017: According to The New York Times, Trump never actually read or was briefed on the content of this memorandum.

Executive Orders (and Memoranda)

I heard on the local talk radio show today that Barack Obama made five executive orders during the first two weeks of his presidency; Donald Trump has made six seven. I decided to look up what they were. I am thankful every day that the internet makes such research easy.

Obama's First Executive Orders:

1. January 20th, 2009: 120-day halt on "legal proceedings" for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
2. January 22nd, 2009: Orders Guantánamo Bay facility to close within a year.
3. January 22nd, 2009: Requires interrogators to follow the methods in the Army Field Manual (same article as #2). In other words, to not torture people. The two psychologists who cooked up the questionable methods used at Guantánamo Bay are still on trial. [link]
4. Before January 26th, 2009: Ends ban on federal funding for international organizations that encourage or perform abortions (pro-choice opinion article; could not find original source in search function). It was reversed by President Trump in 2017 -- in other words, any organization that so much as mentions abortion gets their funding revoked.
5. Soon after January 24th, 2009: Lifts ban on federal funding for stem-cell research. Obama was "expected to" do this when the article was written.

Trump's First Executive Orders:

1. January 20th, 2017: Announcing plans to dismantle (and rebuild?) Obamacare.
2. January 24th, 2017: "Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals For High Priority Infrastructure Projects." I understand that this is aimed at expediting the Dakota Access Pipeline and similar projects.
3. January 25th, 2017: Promises to enforce strict immigration laws, especially on self-declared "sanctuary cities." Couches it as a security measure.
4. January 25th, 2017: "Immigration Enforcement Improvements." With the U.S.-Mexico border.
5. January 27th, 2017: "PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES." This was the thinly-disguised anti-Muslim travel ban. Also, the title was entirely in caps.
6. January 28th, 2017: Lobbying restrictions. Not sure who this is aimed at. I do not have time today to seek out that information.
7. January 30th, 2017: Budget restrictions. He appears to want the agencies to not spend more than in previous years. If one program costs more, cut another to balance it out. This would probably throttle sections of government he and his cabinet members disapprove of.

While I was searching for info, my partner directed me to this article from MSN / The Washington Post about how, technically, not all of Trump's recent declarations are executive orders (commands to a whole department to do things a certain way), but executive memoranda (presidential suggestions). The orders are numbered and published in the Federal Registrar. I guess the memoranda are tracked in press releases?

Now that I've found the Trump Administration's website, I'm going to be visiting it a lot. I...would rather not, but it is the best source for official announcements.