What Happened Today: March 28, 2023

Biden and Ben-Gvir batter Bibi; China's proliferating fake research; The Troubles may be coming back to Northern Ireland; Siegel on disinformation

Mar 28, 2023

The Big Story

A late-night report from NBC News cited an unnamed senior White House official who believed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will “most likely” abandon his controversial overhaul of the nation’s judiciary. It’s the latest instance of the Biden administration’s ongoing pressure campaign to thwart Netanyahu’s reforms, which has included a series of communications between U.S. and Israeli officials that, while usually exchanged behind the scenes, have been made public. Referencing the details of a contentious March 19 phone call between Biden and Netanyahu, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday that Biden said his counterpart needed to “design a way forward that was based on compromise and that could result in … consensus support.”

Netanyahu’s decision to suspend the judicial reform process on Monday pacified some of the protestors who’d brought the country’s businesses and international airport to a standstill, but the path forward for the reforms, to say nothing of Netanyahu’s slim majority government, remains murky. Netanyahu’s dismissal of Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over the weekend invigorated protestors and political opponents alike, yet Gallant, who had broken ranks with the prime minister, was still at work in his office on Tuesday afternoon; his aides told reporters that he has yet to receive the formal notification letter from Netanyahu to leave his post.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, on Monday night circulated to news outlets a letter signed by the prime minister that essentially documented the prime minister’s vow to back the creation of a new national guard in return for Ben-Gvir’s support for the temporary pause to the judicial reform process. Long sought by Ben-Gvir, the controversial volunteer reserves would be deployed during episodes of intense ethnic conflict, which former Israeli police chief Moshe Karadi described as “a private militia for [Ben-Gvir’s] political needs.” Tweeting about the deal, Ben-Gvir wrote that the judicial reform will pass and the national guard will be established. “Nobody will scare us. Nobody will succeed in changing the decision of the people.”

In The Back Pages: A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century

The Rest

→ A Monday night fire at a migration center in Mexico near the U.S. southern border has left at least 39 people dead. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the fire was the result of a protest by migrants in the center after “they found out they’d be deported.” Dozens of others were injured after what initial reports described as mattresses being set on fire near a door of the shelter. Near a major crossing point for migrants, across the border from El Paso, Texas, the shelter often houses migrants who are waiting on decisions about their asylum claims for entry.

→ The list of crimes attributed to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried grew just a little bit longer on Tuesday after prosecutors added a foreign bribery charge alleging he attempted to pay off one or more Chinese officials with $40 million. The latest charge brings SBF’s total federal counts to 13 since he was arrested last November.

→ Quote of the Day:

The worst impact is on sincere Chinese researchers. … There is enough junk coming from China that researchers privately admit that they don’t read papers if they’re from a Chinese source. … Scientists don’t have time to determine what is junk and what isn’t.

That’s from David Bimler, a psychologist and former professor at Massey University (New Zealand) who, along with other researchers, spoke to the Financial Times about the growing number of dubious research papers “that has accompanied China’s emergence as a scientific and technological powerhouse,” as the FT put it.

Over the past 20 years, China’s research output has made it one of the most prolific sources of academic research, accounting for what the U.S.-based research-analysis group Institute for Scientific Information estimated to be 23% of global output, just shy of the 4.4 million papers produced in the United States.
“But experts say that China’s impressive output masks systemic inefficiencies and an underbelly of low-quality and fraudulent research,” the FT writes, noting that the intense emphasis on quantity over quality has increased concerns of the world’s most prestigious journals that as much as 20% of all published papers include fake scientific discoveries.
The implications are significant, not least because bad papers can take years to be discovered and retracted, long after other researchers have used those results to build their own studies.
Now, some editors are hiring fraud detectors like John Chesebro, who combs through submissions to biomedical publisher Spandidos for bad data. “At times you can detect where parts of an image were digitally manipulated to add or remove cells or other features to make the data look like the results you are expecting in the hypothesis,” he said.

→ Northern Ireland’s domestic-terrorism threat level was upgraded to “severe” by Britain’s intelligence agency MI5, the second-highest category, which indicates a forthcoming attack is highly likely. The upgrade comes after a wave of attacks against police offices, just a few weeks ahead of the 25th anniversary celebration of the 1998 peace deal that had quelled decades of sectarian violence in the divided country. Last month, one police officer was badly injured in an attack by a new splinter cell of the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, that had agreed to lay down arms in the Good Friday peace agreement. Authorities say the terrorist warning isn’t linked to the upcoming celebrations, only to the recent spate of attacks on police.

→ The so-called einstein problem has long stumped mathematicians attempting to discover a single shape that could tile a flat, two-dimensional surface indefinitely without creating any sort of repeat pattern. Unlike a typical tiled floor or wallpaper design that periodically uses repeat shapes, an “aperiodic monotile” eluded mathematicians, as no shape could go on infinitely without repeating itself. That is, until David Smith, a 64-year-old self-described shape hobbyist who worked in fields outside of mathematics until retiring, cracked the code by discovering what he and a team of mathematicians described in a new paper as “the hat,” an einstein that resembles a fedora.

→ Continuing their campaign to alienate all other generations, Baby Boomers account for 39% of all new homes being purchased—a major jump from their 29% slice of the pie last year—surpassing millennials, who now account for just 28% of new home acquisitions. The 2023 Home Buyers and Sellers reports reflects Baby Boomers’ growing buying power—only 26% of all buyers were first-time homeowners, the lowest ever, just as Boomers have seen repeat purchases made all the easier thanks to the strength of their home equity boosted by surging home prices during the pandemic. Gen Z, meanwhile, only accounts for 4% of all home purchases, with roughly 1 in every 3 Gen Zer moving on from living with their parents or family members into their new dwelling.

→ Future attorneys are knocking back fewer drinks during law school, a new Bloomberg Law survey found, with only 32% of current law students saying events hosted by schools come with drinks included, a significant drop from the 53% of practicing attorneys who said there was almost always or usually free booze when they were socializing on the school’s dime. And even when the drinks are free, some 32% of students say they’re now picking up non-alcoholic options, twice the 16% of current attorneys who were abstaining while they were students. While some cheer about law schools drying out, the forces driving the abstinence aren’t exactly clear; performance-minded students seeking competitive edges over classmates for future opportunities, more students choosing other substances like recreational cannabis, or just a growing embrace of sobriety and healthy living all could be pushing the trend.

→ Just in time for Opening Day on Thursday, Tablet’s latest Collection—a curated group of stories on a theme—features some of the magazine’s best writing on baseball. Depending on your feelings about the latest changes to the game’s rules, this could be a welcome distraction or a good way to get ready for the spring season.

TODAY IN TABLET:

America’s Original Bestselling Haggadah by Jenna Weissman Joselit

Before there was Maxwell House, there was Mrs. Philip Cowen’s ‘Seder Service’

Supersized Seders by Nomi Kaltmann

Massive Passover gatherings in Thailand and Nepal cater to backpackers—by the thousands

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.

A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century

Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation

By Jacob Siegel

Prologue: The Information War

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.

Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking the social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.

None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”

The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.

When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”

Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. “The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare,” warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a “significant advantage” as the result of “legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not.”

The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. “The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.”

The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.

Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.

Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government’s lead counter-disinformation agency, the GEC, declared that its mission entailed “seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector.” To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.

At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies.

In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.

At around the same time, Hamilton 68 blew up. Publicly, Twitter’s algorithms turned the Russian-influence-exposing “dashboard” into a major news story. Behind the scenes, Twitter executives quickly figured out that it was a scam. When Twitter reverse-engineered the secret list, it found, according to the journalist Matt Taibbi, that “instead of tracking how Russia influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” The discovery prompted Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to suggest in an October 2017 email that the company take action to expose the hoax and “call this out on the bullshit it is."

In the end, neither Roth nor anyone else said a word. Instead, they let a purveyor of industrial grade bullshit—the old fashioned term for disinformation—continue dumping its contents directly into the news stream.

It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”

Even trenchant critics of the phenomenon—including Taibbi and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jeff Gerth, who recently published a dissection of the press’s role in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion claims—have focused on the media’s failures, a framing largely shared by conservative publications, which treat disinformation as an issue of partisan censorship bias. But while there’s no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it’s also a convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it got worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it's because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

The first phase of the information war was marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation. But the next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation's true shape and ultimate design.

This is the prologue to a 13-part essay that will be published by Tablet tomorrow. Please visit tabletmag.com tomorrow to read the rest.

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