March 13, 2024: The Disinformation Complex Comes for Gamers

NHS ends use of puberty blockers; The NIH and DEI; House passes TikTok bill

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The Big Story

Why is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security funding a nonprofit dedicated to fighting “lack of diversity” and “problematic game design” in the video-game industry?

That was our question when reading a Monday blog post from the “mental health” nonprofit Take This titled “Responding to GamerGate 2.” GamerGate 1, of course, was the 2014 social media flame war that pitted a clique of politically progressive video-game industry “insiders” against a decentralized network of “outsiders,” principally gamers mobilized against what they saw as the clubbiness and political groupthink of the industry’s elite. Now widely considered the opening salvo in the internet culture wars, GamerGate was an early example of what media theorist John Robb has described as the “Bad Boys vs. Mean Girls” model of networked politics, in which a largely anonymous, disruptive “open-source insurgency” squares off against a tightly interconnected network of elites coordinating across multiple domains (government, media, private industry) and attempting to rule via manufactured consensus. Sound familiar?  

GamerGate 2 is a budding controversy surrounding Sweet Baby Inc., a Canadian video-game “narrative development and consultation studio” that functions as a sort of sensitivity reader for video-game scripts, partnering with game studios to ensure positive “representation” for LGBT and other minority characters. The studio’s work upset many gamers who, in essence, accused Sweet Baby of ruining games by making them “woke.” That, in turn, led employees of the company to demand that Steam, a gaming and discussion platform, ban a discussion group tracking the games that Sweet Baby had worked on. That sparked a wave of “hate,” “harassment,” and “toxic behavior” on the part of the gamer “mob,” with direct political implications, again according to Take This: 

Large-scale harassment campaigns like this fuel—and are fueled by—political events. As political rhetoric heats up ahead of the US presidential election later this year, this kind of online activity is going to ramp up and it’s important to understand that these phenomena are interrelated. 

Exactly how they are “interrelated” is left to the reader’s imagination, but the implication seems to be that failure to “clearly and unequivocally denounce” GamerGate 2 will lead to all manner of unimaginable evils, potentially including the reelection of Donald Trump. 

Take This, however, is not just any mental-health-in-gaming nonprofit. As Mike Benz points out on X, in 2022, Take This received a $700,000 DHS grant for the “monitoring, detection, and prevention of extremist exploitation in gaming spaces,” alongside two partners: the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism and Logically, a British company that uses AI tools to help “governments, NGOs, and enterprise organizations uncover and address harmful misinformation and deliberate disinformation online.” 

Logically, in particular, sits right at the heart of the public-private counter-disinformation complex. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as Lee Fang reported in January, Logically was hired by the U.K. government’s Counter-Disinformation Unit to monitor online criticism of government pandemic policies, including by categorizing as “misinformation” or “malinformation” social media posts criticizing lockdown policies and vaccine passports on civil libertarian grounds, posts alleging that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a laboratory, and posts from antiwar groups criticizing the expansion of NATO. Logically was also instrumental in the campaign to demonetize the prominent COVID-19 skeptic and free-speech influencer Russell Brand when British media published allegations of sexual assault against Brand in 2023. 

Logically has several contracts in the United States, too, including with the Chicago Police Department, the Pentagon, and the state of Oregon (for monitoring election-related “disinformation”). It is also, according to Fang’s reporting, now part of the U.S. Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, managed by the Center for Internet Security, the nonprofit arm of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Internet Infrastructure Agency. CISA, of course, was instrumental in coordinating Big Tech’s censorship of social media surrounding the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe it’s a coincidence that anti-Sweet Baby streamers are now having their YouTube channels demonetized; but then again, maybe it’s not. 

We don’t know the extent to which Take This is plugged into the same counter-disinformation complex—other than it receiving DHS funding to work with Logically, of course. But we do know that in an April 2022 DHS memo first reported by Fang, a CISA official suggested during an internal strategy meeting that “the agency should use third-party nonprofits as a ‘clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.’” 

As to why DHS is interested in thwarting gamer “radicalization,” we can only guess. As Benz notes in an X video, the gaming industry is larger than the music and film industries combined; it has also traditionally provided a platform for uncensored political speech, especially by Robb’s “bad boys.” Benz points to a 2020 video call with David Anthony, creator of the influential Call of Duty game franchise, at the Atlantic Council, where he was then serving as a non-resident senior fellow. The Atlantic Council is a think tank close to the U.S. intelligence community. In September 2020, it released a report advocating that DHS take the lead in protecting the United States against “nonmilitary” threats, including foreign disinformation; shortly before that, its Digital Forensics Research Laboratory had joined the newly formed Election Integrity Partnership, which, working with DHS, served as the government’s “deputized disinformation flagger” (in Michael Shellenberger’s words), doing the things “the government could not do [itself]” because it lacked the “funding and the legal authorizations,” according to statements from its head, Alex Stamos.

In the clip, Anthony worries about the future of democracy and likens the 2016 election to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as a catastrophic “failure of imagination.” We suspect that DHS’s interest in alleged “extremism” in gaming is borne of a desire not to let that same failure happen again. 

Read more here: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/01/25/logicallyai_of_britain_embodies_the_wide_global_logic_of_censorship_1007195.html#!

And here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ax4n3/dhs-to-spend-almost-dollar700000-investigating-radicalization-in-gaming

And here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

IN THE BACK PAGES: Bernard-Henri Lévy unveils his plan to stop the war in Gaza

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The Rest

→The British National Health Service announced on Tuesday that it will no longer prescribe puberty blockers to children at NHS gender clinics, saying that the treatment will be available to children only as part of clinical trials designed to test their efficacy. In a policy document explaining the decision, the NHS said it had “concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of (puberty blockers) to make the treatment routinely available at this time.”

→As the NHS takes a belated step toward sanity, health authorities in the United States are moving in the opposite direction. John Sailer reports in The Wall Street Journal that the National Institutes of Health is requiring universities to consider diversity statements when hiring faculty in the biomedical sciences through the NIH’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) grant program. The FIRST program requires that all grant recipients evaluate diversity statements for their hires under the program; many institutions appear to be using a rubric developed by the University of California, Berkeley, which penalizes candidates in fields such as computational biology and neurobiology for saying that they plan to “treat everyone the same” or for expressing skepticism about dividing students into racially segregated “affinity groups.” Northwestern’s rubric, meanwhile, puts equal weight on a candidate’s “commitment to diversity” and their research potential—i.e., their ability to contribute new knowledge to the biomedical sciences. 

Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nih-sacrifices-scientific-rigor-for-dei-f828a6c7 

→In yesterday’s edition, we mentioned the U.S. intelligence assessment predicting “large protests” demanding Netanyhu’s resignation due to his allegedly flagging popularity. Thanks to new polling highlighted on X by Caroline Glick, if we see those protests in the next few weeks, we’ll know where they came from: 

→The House of Representatives voted 352-65 on Wednesday to pass a bill that would require TikTok to sever ties with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States. Despite Donald Trump railing against the bill for potentially strengthening Facebook, only 15 Republicans voted against it, among them Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. President Biden has said that he will sign the bill into law if it passes the Senate. 

→Stat of the Day: $77 million

That’s how much the U.S. State Department spent on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives in 2022 and 2023, according to disclosures to Congress reported by The Daily Wire’s Spencer Lindquist. The State Department has requested an additional $83.3 million for DEI efforts in fiscal year 2024. 

→Russia has the capacity to produce nearly three times as many artillery shells per month as NATO, according to a NATO intelligence estimate viewed by CNN. The Russian defense industry, according to the estimate, is currently producing about 250,000 artillery shells per month, or 3 million per year, and Moscow imported at least another 300,000 shells from Iran in 2023. The United States and Europe combined have the capacity to produce only about 1.2 million shells per year, but even that is currently theoretical: A U.S. Army official quoted in CNN said that the United States plans to produce 100,000 shells per month by the end of 2025, but that level of production—in addition to being more than a year off—is premised on funding contained in the $95 billion foreign aid package, currently stalled in Congress.

→Car manufacturers are quietly collecting detailed driving data from internet-connected vehicles and selling it to insurance companies, which then use the information to raise drivers’ premiums, according to a report in The New York Times. The Times article tells the story of a 65-year-old driver of a Chevy Bolt who was shocked when the cost of his car insurance jumped 21% due to a report from the data broker LexisNexis. When he requested a consumer disclosure report from LexisNexis, he received more than 130 pages detailing every time that he and his wife had driven the car over the previous six months, including whether they had sped or made any hard brakes or sharp accelerations—data that had been collected without his knowledge by General Motors, the manufacturer of the Bolt. Companies that produce smart cars, including GM, Honda, Kia, and Hyundai, claim that drivers are consenting to these data collections by turning on internet-connected services such as navigation and roadside assistance, but the Times report includes screenshots of the enrollment process for the OnStar Smart Driver service on the author’s Chevrolet, which does not mention that the data may be shared with third parties. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) last month urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate these data collection practices, arguing that they are a potential “per se violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act,” which prohibits deceptive business practices. 

Read the rest here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Heart of the Matter, by Lisa J. Wise

Searching for safety—in a doctor’s office, or at a firing range—in a time of heightened risks

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Stop the War in Gaza

In the only way it can be done

By Bernard-Henri Lévy

An American soldier, Aaron Bushnell, lights himself on fire in solidarity with Palestine.

An electorate, in the United States, on both the left and the right, disputes with more and more vehemence Biden’s support of Israel.

Lula’s Brazil, and the South Africa of Mandela's heirs, decry Israel’s supposed crimes against humanity: “It’s apartheid, it’s genocide,” they say.

And now, the awful images from the humanitarian convoy into Gaza City and its dozens of dead, some crushed by the famished crowd, some thrown under the truck wheels, and others killed by panicked soldiers in the Israeli escort.

Too much is too much, scold the great and the good of globalization.

Enough, the chancelleries declare, nearly in unison.

It’s a worldwide row, a tumult, a planetary outcry.

A wind of hate blows over Israel, but also, from San Diego to Zurich by way of Paris, on the world’s Jewish communities.

***

Never mind that it was the IDF itself that, in the humanitarian convoy drama, initiated the investigation concluding (an uncommon thing in a “genocidal” army!) that it shared responsibility for accidental civilian deaths.

Never mind that the U.S. would later manage to kill five Palestinian civilians with an airdrop, not because anyone intended to do so but because it is difficult to operate humanitarian missions in a war zone.

Never mind that a fifth of the population of this country “under apartheid” is made up of Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians, who (without mentioning the Christian, Druze or Bedouin minorities) enjoy the same civil rights as their fellow Jewish citizens.

And let’s not mention the astonishing role reversal that has those crying out against genocide are the same people who call for the birth of a Palestine from the Jordan River to the sea that would involve an ethnic cleansing purging the entire region of all Jewish presence. (Apparently, pure genocide is OK, where imagined genocide is worthy of an impassioned outcry!)

This is where we are.

These proud members of the global Empire of Palestine hardly flinch when China commits genocide against its Uyghurs, Iran its Kurds, and Putin the Chechens or Ukrainians.

They can find no complaints with the fact that neo-Ottoman Turkey resumes, in Nagorno-Karabakh, its endless war against the Armenian people.

I see no mobilizations on campus when an Arab state, Syria, kills not just thousands, but hundreds of thousands of civilians, backed by Iran, which promises even greater massacres against Jews and anyone in the region who dares to oppose it.

But, now it’s about Israel.

It’s about this minuscule country that the international community, still drunk on 2,000 years of spilled Jewish blood, finally recognized, after decades of broken promises, and only after the Shoah.

It’s about a small, fragile, and threatened country that, confronted with the most sadistic mass terror attack in modern history, responds like any other democracy would have in its place, and, in fact, like the United States did when invading Afghanistan after Sept. 11, or like France bombing Mosul—where thousands of civilians died alongside 3,000 ISIS fighters—after the Bataclan.

Instead of supporting Israel in its legitimate self-defense, the world accuses the Jewish state of poisoning wells and starving the civilian population; it’s no longer opinion, it’s demonization; it’s the unified non-thought of Humanity 2.0, the sequence of its speech and reflexes, which takes for granted that Israel is “indefensible,” that Zionism—alone among national liberation movements—is a curse word, and that the very survival of the Jewish people on its land is an entirely legitimate object of dispute.

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Faced with this unprecedented surge of political and digital hatred, faced with these amnesiac crowds for whom it seems evident that the Oct. 7 pogrom has become, in their eyes, a mere detail of history, what can we hope for?

That the IDF, of course, continues to do all it can—faced with an enemy lurking among its population and using it as human shields—to limit civilian deaths.

And that the country, once this war is over, maintains its will to find new and better leadership.

But, in the meantime, when one is not Israeli but American or French, there are not 36 solutions. There are only two.

Persist, as the Monsieur Homaises from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary of the white-hot streets of the world do, chanting “Cease-fire now! Cease-fire now!” a solution that would have the obvious effect of handing victory to Hamas; to prolong the hold of a Muslim Brotherhood death cult on a population that serves as its guinea pig in a horrific experiment; to see the aura of the terror cult and its backers grow, and grow again, beyond Gaza, with all the cataclysmic consequences that one can imagine, both throughout the Middle East and in Europe.

Or to expect the international community, and even Hamas’ sponsoring countries, to demand of the aggressor two very simple things that would immediately end this atrocious war and the suffering it causes: Liberate the Israeli hostages who are still alive; and lay down their arms, recognizing, in one way or another, defeat.

Who has the courage to demand this?

Who cares enough about the fate of Israelis and Gazans alike to force the aggressor to stop its monstrous blackmail, instead of telling the victims to submit?

Does anyone care about peace and justice enough to demand an end to this war, in the only way it can actually end—with the defeat of Hamas?

To do this, simply change the program and, instead of “Free Palestine,” think “Peace now.”