This
October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users,
including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among
those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized
police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project,
Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.
Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our
rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like
The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as
legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who
contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream
sources and silencing alternative voices.”
In comments published here
for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed
a degree of credit for the recent purge — and promised more takedowns in the
near future.
“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our
open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the
Asia program at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund, which
is funded
by the U.S. government and NATO. “They can invent stories that get
repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push
back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this
is just the beginning.”
Fly went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set
up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members
of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix
the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.
Fly made these stunning
comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty in sociology at the
University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of this article. The two
spoke during a lunch break at a conference on Asian security organized by
the Stiftung
Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, Germany on Oct. 15 and 16.
The remarks by Fly — “we are just starting to push back” —
seemed to confirm the worst fears of the alternative online media community. If
he was to be believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics, not spam
prevention, and was driven by powerful interests hostile to dissident views,
particularly where American state violence is concerned.
Fly: A Rising Neocon
Fly is an influential
foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year lobbying for the
censorship of “fringe views” on social media. Over the years, he has advocated
for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria, and hiking
military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a
neoconservative cadre.
Like so many
second-generation neocons, Fly entered government by burrowing into
mid-level positions in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and
Department of Defense.
In 2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative(FPI), a rebranded
version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, or PNAC. The latter
outfit was an umbrella group of neoconservative activists that first made the
case for an invasion of Iraq as part of a wider project of regime change in
countries that resisted Washington’s sphere of influence.
By 2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNAC’s blueprint
by clamoring for military strikes on Iran.
“More diplomacy is not an adequate response,” he argued. A year later,
Fly urged the US to “expand its list of
targets beyond the [Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control
elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities
associated with other key government officials.”
Fly soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a
neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign policy advisor.
Amongst other interventionist initiatives, Rubio has taken the lead in
promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting
Venezuela, even advocating for a U.S. military assault on the country. When Rubio’s
2016 presidential campaign floundered amid a mass revolt of the Republican
Party’s middle American base against the party establishment, Fly was forced to
cast about for new opportunities.
He found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon after Donald
Trump’s shock election victory.
PropOrNot Provides the Spark
A journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton
presidential campaign, Shattered, revealed
that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility
for her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according
to the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the
up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
Less than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, The Washington Post’s
Craig Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined,
“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news.’” The article hyped up a
McCarthyite effort by a shadowy, anonymously run organization called PropOrNot
to blacklist some 200 American media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”
The alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot
blacklist included some of those recently purged by Facebook
and Twitter, such as The Free Thought Project and Anti-Media. Among the criteriaPropOrNot identified as signs of
Russian propaganda were: “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of
the EU and Eurozone” and “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and
Syrian resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations by the
U.S. government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.
According to Timberg, who uncritically promoted the media
suppression initiative, Propornot was established by “a nonpartisan collection
of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”
Timberg quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University Center
for Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote
with his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.
Timberg’s piece on PropOrNot was promoted widely by former top Clinton staffers and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide
Dan Pfeiffer as “the biggest story in the world.” But after a wave of stinging
criticism, including in the pages of The New Yorker, the article was amended with an
editor’s note stating, “The [Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the
validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but
the concept behind it — exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for
Kremlin “active measures” — continued to flourish.
Taxpayers Pay for Russian Bot Tracker
By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the
blue, this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign
policy hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance
for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how
supposed Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with
divisive narratives.
It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted
the supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site
avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be
tracking. The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the founder of the
Democratic Party think tank the Center for American Progress, and former chief
of staff of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s
chief Russia-gate correspondent, promoted the bot tracker as “a very cool
tool.”Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by one of the most respected
think tanks in Washington, the German Marshall Fund, which had been founded
in 1972 to nurture the special relationship between the U.S. and what was then
West Germany.
The German Marshall Fund is substantially funded by Western
governments, and largely reflects their foreign-policy interests.
Its top two financial sponsors, at more than $1 million per year each, are the
U.S. government’s soft-power arm the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) and the German Foreign Office
(Auswärtiges Amt). The U.S. State Department also provides more than half a
million dollars per year, as do the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and
Development and the foreign affairs ministries of Sweden and Norway. It
likewise receives at least a quarter of a million dollars per year from NATO.
Though the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that
specifically sponsored its Alliance for Securing Democracy initiative, it hosts
a who’s who of bipartisan national-security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council, providing the endeavor with
the patina of credibility. They range from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to
former Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan and ex-CIA director Michael
Morell.
Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist,
emerged as one of the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in
the media. Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy aide to
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series of interviews and co-authored several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive
social media crackdown.
During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that
“Russian accounts” were “trying to promote certain messages, amplify certain
content, raise fringe views, pit Americans against each other, and we need to
deal with this ongoing problem and find ways through the government, through
tech companies, through broader society to tackle this issue.”
Yet few of the sites on PropOrNot’s blacklist, and none of the
alternative sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that Fly and
his colleagues take apparent credit for, were Russian accounts. Perhaps the
only infraction they could have been accused of was publishing views that Fly
and his cohorts saw as “fringe.”
What’s more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of
Twitter accounts it initially identified as “Russian bots” were not necessarily
bots — and may not have been Russian either.
‘Not Convinced on This Bot
thing’
A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal
found that the ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of
cranks, counter-terror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with
support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national
security apparatus.”
These figures included the same George Washington University
Center for Cyber and Homeland Security fellows — Andrew Weisburd and Clint
Watts — that were cited as experts in the Washington Post’s article promoting
PropOrNot.
Weisburd, who has been described as one of the brains behind the
Hamilton 68 dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web
monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims
and anyone he considered “anti-American.” More recently, he has taken to
Twitter to spout off murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald,
the editor of The Intercept — a publication
the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence
operations.
Watts, for his part, has testified before Congress on several
occasions to call on the government to “quell
information rebellions” with censorious measures including “nutritional labels”
for online media. He has received fawning publicity from corporate media and
been rewarded with a contributor role for NBC on the basis of his supposed
expertise in ferreting out Russian disinformation.
However, under questioning during a public
event by Grayzone contributor
Ilias Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were
false, and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful
claims about malicious Russian bot activity.
In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to
completely disown the Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a legitimate tool. “I’m not
convinced on this bot thing,” Watts confessed. He even called the narrative
that he helped manufacture “overdone,” and admitted that the accounts Hamilton
68 tracked were not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.
“We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all.
We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really
into promoting Russia,” Watts conceded.
But these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of
the coming purge.
Enter the Atlantic Council
In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly
stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge
alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook.
The Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that
serves as a gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists
pushing military aggression around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive, US-allied governments including
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as by Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor
Pynchuk.
This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the
Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose,
and explain disinformation during elections around the world.”
The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is notorious for its zealous
conflation of legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian activity,
embracing the same tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.
Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow
who has built his reputation on flushing out online Kremlin influence
networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt
this year that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as
Russian bots or Kremlin “influence accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam
Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the
famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner
named Ian Shilling.
In an interview with Sky News, Shilling
delivered a memorable tirade against his accusers. “I
have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know any Russians, I have no
contact with the Russian government or anything to do with them,” he exclaimed.
“I am an ordinary British citizen who happens to do research on the current
neocon wars which are going on in Syria at this very moment.”
With the latest Facebook and
Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling are being targeted in the open,
and without apology. The mass deletions of alternative media accounts
illustrate how national security hardliners from the German Marshall Fund and
Atlantic Council (and whoever was behind PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the
manufactured panic around Russian interference to generate public support for a
wider campaign of media censorship.
In his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with
apparent approval that, “Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in the
2018 election.” As the mantra of foreign interference expands to a new
adversarial power, the clampdown on voices of dissent in online media is almost
certain to intensify.
As Fly promised, “This is just the beginning.”
This article originally appeared on the Grayzoneproject.com.
