Internet secrets: control and manipulation of information

Organized efforts to clamp down on the free flow of info online are increasing. In today's podcast we'll look at some techniques you might not have heard about...used to control and manipulate what you see and hear.

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Sharyl Attkisson  0:08  

Hi, everybody, Sharyl Attkisson here. Welcome to another edition of the Sharyl Attkisson Podcast on JustTheNews.com, a digital news site dedicated to facts, not spin, and reporting on underreported stories, and views that cut across the grain or are ignored by other media outlets. I hope you'll subscribe to this podcast and all our JustTheNews podcasts, John Solomon Reports and The Pod's Honest Truth. And I hope you'll think about preordering my new book, Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism. Today, I'm going to tell you about some internet secrets. There are a lot of things you probably suspect are going on with control and manipulation of information on the internet, and maybe a few things you haven't yet thought of. 

We all like to think of the internet as a place where ideas are freely exchanged, information of all kinds is readily accessible, controversial voices and ideas can be heard. It's sort of this fast-paced Wild West dynamic and ideally, manipulation of the message and control of information would be difficult to accomplish here. And in fact, I think that was pretty much the case for many years. But we all are learning that the reality is becoming far different. There are so many examples of what I call astroturf campaigns taking root online, social media being used to manipulate the message in recent years. I'm going to go over a couple of overview examples. You already know the mess that's happening with Twitter. In 2015, there were hints of this. Twitter was making plans for an 'Ask the President' town hall with President Obama. And that was an effort really to compete with rivals like Reddit, which was drawing attention for its interactive q&a sessions with well-known people. Well, the Twitter session with the President was supposed to be this freewheeling event where people could weigh in and ask questions. But, according to a former Twitter senior employee, who ended up spilling the beans to BuzzFeed, the head of Twitter at the time, Dick Costolo had ordered employees to build an algorithm to filter out any abusive tweets that might be directed at President Obama during this q&a session. In other words, they were filtering the information so it would appear to be something, maybe, that it wasn't so that the audience might appear to be a little different than it really was. A source said that Twitter also was manually censoring the 'Ask the President' tweets because the automated system was inconsistent. So, this decision to control the message at the time was kept secret from some senior employees according to the whistleblower, for fear that the Twitter employees would object because, you know, Twitter was supposed to be this place where they didn't do that sort of thing. And some Twitter employees who found out this was going on were said to be upset, because they believed that the censorship, again, this is back in 2015, defied Twitter's suppose a commitment to free speech. 

Now, think about that. How far we've come and just a few years where Twitter is actively censoring all kinds of free speech. Facebook, as we well know, has its own demons. But there were former insiders at the social media site that were speaking out as early as 2016, claiming that news on Facebook was being presented or withheld for biased reasons. In May 2016, an ex-Facebook employee was anonymously quoted on Gizmodo, that's the design technology and Science Fiction website. The ex-Facebook employee said he had been part of a project that quote, 'routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social networks influential trending news section.' Several people who were reportedly employed at Facebook, as what they call news curators, told Gizmodo that they were instructed to quote, 'artificially inject selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren't really popular enough to warrant inclusion.' Depending on who is on shift, they said things would be blacklisted or trending. One former curator said that suppressed topics on Facebook included former IRS official Lois Lerner, you remember she took the Fifth before Congress after being accused of targeting conservative groups. Also a suppressed topic, according to a former Facebook curator, was the popular news aggregator the Drudge Report. Well, Facebook denied the allegations, but we've seen since then many examples of suppressed topics. 

You know, online manipulation can be found all over the place, not just social media, of course, but on news and quasi news sites as well. There was a really interesting example I found in January of 2016. It was an internet smear that was orchestrated against a Hollywood film based on a true-life story. The film was '13 Hours the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.' If you haven't seen that film, try to find it. It really was a great film. It tells the personal stories of three CIA operators who heroically helped fight off the Islamic extremist attackers on September 11, 2012. This is a movie that supporters of presidential candidate at the time Hillary Clinton apparently decided they must smear by necessity because Clinton, as you may know, was Secretary of State during the real-life nights tragic events at Benghazi. Dozens of Americans in Benghazi had waited for an outside US military rescue during that attack that never came. President Obama was basically missing-in-action that night. The military blamed Hillary Clinton's State Department for not giving the green light to launch a rescue operation. It's hard to say exactly who was to blame for that. Some people also blamed President Obama. There was testimony, despite what you've read, that there were operators that were close enough by that they could have made a rescue attempt. They wanted to make a rescue attempt. People were on the way to make a rescue attempt but were turned back. Whatever the case four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed. Well, it would be difficult for the administration at the time and Hillary Clinton to directly impeach the heroes in this film '13 Hours the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.' So, what they did was seek to controversialize the movie itself, to try to keep people from seeing it, to convince the potential audience that it's a boring film. It's tedious, it's a flop. So even before the movie's release, before the release, there was a suspicious stampede of negative reviews. And whether intentional or not, they lead to an astroturf smear campaign. 

Vox, the left-wing website headed by liberal blogger Ezra Klein, panned '13 Hours' in a really extensive blog based solely on the trailer if you can believe it, not even the actual film. Here's what the Vox site wrote. Quote, 'even the trailer from Michael Bay's Benghazi moving is patronizing and dishonest.' That was from Vox's Max Fisher. He goes on to, incorrectly by the way, portray as a myth the idea that military rescuers were prevented from quickly helping. That's exactly what military rescuers testified to, including some behind closed doors. But, anyway, he decides that's a myth. On the website Deadline Hollywood, Anthony Dalesandro claims that '13 Hours' opened, quote 'lower than expected.' In other words, had a disappointing box office opening. Gary Susman of Moviefone claimed it struck out at the box office. The Hill agreed in a blog post that was titled 'Benghazi film flops at the box office.' Salons hit job was titled, 'Audiences reject '13 Hours; big blow for the rights desperate quest for Clinton's Benghazi smoking gun. It's just not there.' Yes, that was the actual headline. Alyssa Rosenberg, a left-wing culture blogger for The Washington Post portrayed '13 Hours' as quote, 'boring,' and she sprinkled her review with tried and true astroturf language, such as conspiracy theories and obsessed. That kind of told me she was part of spreading propaganda. Flavorwire too claimed that the film had tanked. The Washington Post gossip blogger Erik Wemple advanced the narrative of '13 Hours' as a conservative movie, apparently hoping the label would discourage viewers from wanting to see it or at least from admitting publicly that they like it. And proving the effectiveness by the way of media matters nonpartisan veneer, a false veneer. Wemple even quoted Media Matters in his blog without disclosing its conflict of interest. It is a liberal smear group tied to Hillary Clinton. And, yet, Wemple wrote, quote, 'an analysis by Media Matters found that in the 20 months following the Benghazi attacks, the leading Cable News Network ran nearly 1,100 segments on the topic.' If you hadn't seen the movie for yourself, you might read these reviews and think that it is a terrible movie and a box office flop, but let's look beyond the smear. '13 Hours' was actually the number two grossing new movie released in the United States it's opening week, second only to Ride Along 2. It was the number four movie in the United States overall. And by early February of its release was the number three movie of the year. Its opening weekend '13 Hours' closed in on Paramount Pictures projection of $20 million in earnings, taking in more than 19 million for the four day weekend. Variety stated that, quote, 'the wartime drama took in a respectable $900 million at 1,995 locations on Thursday night,' that was after its opening. By way of comparison, at the same time, the propagandists were all calling this Benghazi movie a dud. The '13 Hours' opening was actually in the same range as 'The Wolf of Wall Street' and surpassed 'The Big Short,' which had been released a month earlier, but neither of those was considered to be a flop at that stage. As for audience popularity, the majority of reviews for '13 Hours' the Benghazi movie were overwhelmingly positive, hovering, at the time, around 87% positive on RottenTomatoes.com. Compare that to 58% for Ride Along 2. So, is it just a coincidence that while '13 Hours' is enjoying a respectable weekend box office opening and rave audience reviews, there was a singularly negative false narrative being furthered by the liberal media. I think there's no better example of astroturf. On the other hand, when the antagonists portrayed in the film, sort of the person portrayed as the bad guy, comes forward to slam the movie because of course, he didn't like it much as an accused thief could claim innocence after his fingerprints appeared on the jewels he supposedly stole. Well, the media treated his claims, the disgruntled antagonist's claims, as the definitive truth. He was the CIA chief in Benghazi who allegedly delay the CIA operators from helping some of their comrades who were under attack.

Quote, 'baloney,' declares NBC News taking the side of the CIA official, the one that was accused of bad behavior. Staying on narrative, NBC stated that the movie not only was baloney but quote 'has generally gotten lousy reviews,' and claimed, quote, 'conservatives have been touting it because it portrays State Department officials who were taking orders at the time from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a bad light.' Well, it may be true that conservatives were pouncing on the Benghazi example to criticize Clinton. It is incorrect to suggest that all the news reporting fell in this category and that there weren't legitimate serious issues to consider about the whole Benghazi mess. 

You might ask, why am I looking at this whole Benghazi movie, an example of astroturf and a smear on the internet rather than, hey, it was just a consensus among liberal bloggers that was a bad movie. Well, I think there's a series of tells that shows this is an orchestrated campaign. First, the players, which include a familiar group of media outlets that are well known for advancing liberal narratives, same group, and often advancing whatever happens to be on the Media Matters agenda. Whether they formally organized to do this, or they're simply receptive to the particular narrative, it doesn't matter, they're clearly helpful soldiers and what I call the astroturf wars. Another tell: their information that they're providing is misleading, and in some cases inaccurate, showing me at least that their mission is to further a narrative, rather than simply reflect the truth. And third, some of the efforts appear disingenuous, for example, slamming a movie on the basis of viewing a trailer. That's not the work of a reporter or even a sincere reviewer. It's a product of the agenda-driven. I might also mention that the reviews themselves use well-recognized astroturf language. So, taken together, I think it's hard to draw any other conclusion than the consensus against '13 Hours,' that movie, at least among these reviewers was rooted in an astroturf smear campaign. Now, remember, in the end, astroturf succeeds if it does nothing more than distract from the truth by throwing so much confusing information into the mix. Ordinary Americans throw up their hands and disregard all of it. 

Next, I want to talk about a case study that happened to involve Scott Adams, creator of the office humor comic strip Dilbert, who's a pretty interesting Twitter follow, I might add. I believe his handle is @ScottAdamsSays. But in October of 2016, Adams wrote a very serious blog post called 'This Week I Became a Target.' And in that post, he claimed that he'd been targeted by Hillary Clinton interest because of his support at the time for Donald Trump. The campaign against him employed classic facets of astroturf attacks against him on social media, attacks against him in the news, even attacks on a book review site. He wrote in his blog, 'this weekend, I got shadowbanned on Twitter. It lasted until my followers noticed and protested. Shadowbanning,' he said, 'prevents my followers from seeing my tweets and replies that in a way that's not obvious until you do some digging. Why did I get shadowbanned? Beats me, but it was probably because I asked people to tweet me examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supporters in public. I got a lot of them. It was chilling.' Adams also reveals that the week before that shadow ban on Twitter, his twitter feed had been, quote, 'invaded by an army of Clinton trolls leaving sarcastic insults and not much else on my feed. There was an obvious similarity to them, meaning it was organized.' Now, around the same time, coincidentally, of course, the liberal website Slate published a hit piece on Adams. He wrote, Adams wrote, quote, 'it was so lame that I retweeted it myself. The timing of the hit piece might be a coincidence, but I stopped believing in coincidences this year.' And you will notice when hits on a person, a reporter, an idea when those happen, there is a usual group have the usual suspects, quasi blogs, quasi news sites, they all join in together. They're all marching to the same tune, saying the same thing, attacking the same person or idea. 

Adams mentions two more coincidences in his blog. The one and only speaking engagement that he had booked for 2017, and this is in 2016, was suddenly canceled. The host told him that there was a desire to quote 'go in a different direction.' Then, people began posting negative reviews of one of his books on Amazon. One of the reviewers wrote, 'I wouldn't buy anything from an author who feels he's too rich and gets taxed too much.' Another wrote, 'Adams thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, spoiler: he isn't, not by a longshot. Adams also believes he pays too much in taxes and that Donald Trump is a genius. Save your money and save Scott Adams the grief of paying more taxes.' Adams concluded his blog by writing 'all things considered, I had a great week. I didn't realize I was having enough impact to get on the Clinton enemies list. Don't think I'm supposed to be happy about any of this,' he wrote, 'but that's not how I'm wired. Mmm, critics delicious.' You know what happened to Adams demonstrates the many simultaneous paths that a smear can travel to marginalize a target, from harassment on social media to cutting into one's livelihood. An operation like that takes connections. Adams' story reminds me of a respected ex-member of Congress, who had a great job for years at a Washington DC law firm and lobby group until he dared to publicly criticize President Obama and Hillary Clinton on national security issues. And for the first time ever, he told me, his firm tried to shut him up and instructed him to cancel scheduled television appearances. He was told the top people at his firm in New York were supporters of Clinton for president and weren't happy about his analyses that were critical of Clinton and Obama on national security. But, when he continued his TV appearances despite the warnings from his employer, he got a perfunctory email telling him to collect his belongings. He'd been fired. Powerful interests have many ways to silence critics and to use the internet to do it and to control the narrative, to control the information, to get people fired, have their speeches canceled, controversialize them in the news. 

In March of 2014, a University of Colorado professor named Roger Pielke Jr, who used to write about climate change, wrote his first piece for the website 538. It was titled 'Disasters Cost More Than Ever, But Not Because of Climate Change.' Now, you can imagine what hackles got rankled because of that, from the viewpoint of global warming activists, Pielke's views had to be crushed. He was saying disasters were costing but not because of climate change. So, that was followed by the liberal website Think Progress, publishing a hit piece discrediting Pielke, calling him a controversial hire for 538, claiming that he had used deeply misleading data. Soon, Salon, Slate, Huffington Post echoed the criticism. Remember, I told you these usual suspects, this typical group, they all come out at once attacking the same person or idea at the same time to try to make it ubiquitous. To make everybody come out and tweet about it and put it on social media may be reported on the news. Well, Salon, Slate and Huffington Post, were putting the squeeze on 538 editor-in-chief Nate Silver, they were writing, 'Silver is still backing the wrong horse and the sooner he dumps Pielke, the better.' That was written by Slate's David Auerbach, so, they're trying to get him fired. They're going after somebody who has the wrong idea by trying to take away their livelihood, take away their voice. Before long, 538 Silver buckled. He published a mea culpa rebuttal to the Pielke story and stated, 'all journalism relies on trust and anytime that trust is undermined, it's a huge concern for us. We thank you for your continued feedback. We're listening and learning.' And with that, Pielke stopped writing about climate change. Voice silenced.

More than two years later, this would be in 2016, there were emails released by WikiLeaks, and they provided a window into that effort to make sure that Pielke was controversialized for his viewpoints. Think Progress editor, Judd Legum, was writing Megadonor Tom Steyer, a hedge fund billionaire and global warming activist, who you may recall, recently ran for president. Anyway, the Think Progress editors taking credit for stopping Pielke in this email that was leaked to WikiLeaks. 'I think it's fair to say without Think Progress's blog, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538,' said Legum, the Think Progress editor in this email. In response to all of this, this leak in of this reporting by WikiLeaks, the leak of the email, Pielke talked to reporters about it, who asked and he said, Pielke, 'it spells out here in black and white that there was an organized, politically motivated campaign to damage my career and reputation based on a perception that my academic research was thought to be inconvenient.' And then Pielke did a little detective work of his own, the one who was attacked for writing about climate change not being the cause of disasters increasing cost. He did a little detective work and he posted a graph showing the frequency of attacks orchestrated by Think Progress's parent the Center for American Progress. I've written about these groups and the many ties they have between them have their common people among them, but it's made to look as though there are many, many different outfits and people in organizations, when in fact it's often just a few people pulling strings under different names, a few funders, relative few, funding certain efforts, but spreading it out over a lot of different names of nonprofits and organizations and super PACs. Anyway, Pielke learned that the Center for American Progress, he said, 'wrote 160 plus articles about me,' this is Pielke, 'many misrepresenting my views and calling me a climate skeptic and denier.' He goes on to say, 'with their megaphone propaganda worked, I'm surprised I lasted as long as I did.' He also said 'they were ultimately successful in removing an academic from working on a topic. There's nothing like a political witch hunt to help you focus on career priorities.' Now, at the Center for American Progress, which was involved in this, what he called, Pielke called, a witch hunt against him because he was writing the wrong thing about climate change. The Center for American Progress is a think tank founded by John Podesta, who was President Clinton's Chief of Staff, leader of President Obama's transition team, head of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. For their part, they said they were simply correcting Pielke's misinformation. More right after this break.

We're back. Here's where I'm going to get into a little information you may not have given much thought to when it comes to manipulating information online using the internet to control information, astroturf efforts. What's left when you want to find information that's not posing a hidden agenda after all the things we know about that's manipulated. Well, if you think that there's more transparency over the op-ed pages of major newspapers, you probably haven't been paying attention. I talked to a noted player in the smear industry for my book, The Smear, and, he told me, quote, 'I write op-eds in the name of other people. I'm advocating for large clients, communicating somebody else's idea. I've written five of them in four days on different topics I know little about.' His signature is never at the bottom of his own work. It's always somebody else's, someone who is paid for use of their name, maybe a university doctor, a physician or an economist, signs the op-ed as if they wrote it, that they've been paid to sign their name to it. Maybe it's a current or retired public notable who's been paid to sign their name to an op-ed to advance an agenda or an idea. It's kind of like money laundering only instead of hiding the origin of the ill-gotten gains, this method masks the source of what is nothing more than paid opinions disguised as an op-ed. The ghostwriter of the op-ed never gets credit, he gets a paycheck. I was talking to this ghostwriter, this astroturf-for-hire. And I said most people think op-eds are written by the neighbor who signed on to the op-ed or an interested party who signed the op-ed, someone who just feels strongly about a topic. Well, the guy who works in this field replies 'I know I used to think that, too.' He said, quote, 'after working in DC so many years, even I'm surprised at how so few write their own material, even impressive elected officials. I mean, really well-known people,' he says. I interviewed another player who dabbles in this business. He was a trial lawyer and a Democrat activist. He told me 'I get letters published in newspapers all the time from my clients.' And he said, 'you know what? No newspaper editor ever asks if the client really wrote it.' He said to me, 'can you believe that they don't even ask.' An internal memo written by the Clinton super PAC Correct the Record actually boasted that between May 15, 2015, and December 1, 2015, it quote, 'The super PAC helped write and place 36 op-eds across the country in a number of publications, including Politico, Times Union, Huffington Post, CNN, Washington Blade and New Jersey's Bergen Record. Comments on the internet just like these newspaper comments, or these newspaper op-eds, they're also prime astroturf real estate. They're places where information is, in essence, manipulated for a public audience. Public interests, who are disguised as ordinary people troll assigned topics, news sites, reporters, blogs, social media, for the purpose of posting comments that spin and confuse and controversialize. Sometimes they'll pretend to be an advocate for something, but post something that sounds so outrageous, it's actually designed to create outrage against those people. They're really not an advocate for that opinion. 

Anyway, you already knew some of this, but there's another common arena that's being manipulated right under our noses maybe you haven't thought much about. It's the Federal Register. The Federal Register is where federal agencies publish their proposed regulations. So, the public can comment on them before they're inactive. They have to do this as a matter of law. It's a process required under something called the Administrative Procedure Act. Agencies are supposed to get the public feedback and respond to it and, if necessary, amend their proposed regulations accordingly. But, I'm betting most of you who are listening to this have never submitted a single official comment about any of the millions of Federal Regulations enacted over the years. So, who's filling up these comment sections online? You guessed it: insiders and paid interest, those who want to stop a certain regulation, or have a certain regulation passed or amended in their favor. And again, I spoke to one player in the field and he told me he spends a great deal of time and effort filing comments on the Federal Register on behalf of his paid clients. Of course, that's not who signs them. This guy told me quote, 'I do a lot of work, beating back bad regulations by using the comment period by driving comments into the government,' he told me. It's effective and it doesn't cost a penny. 

As you can see, the complacency that is used by the media and deciding, did someone really write an op-ed? Did the person who signed it really penned the op-ed? Or was it a paid force? The complacency used by the federal government to allow this process of the Federal Register to be co-opted in the way that it is. As you can see, these are incredibly powerful propaganda and publicity forces. And what that means is, sometimes the public gets very little of the truth. Special interests, they have unlimited time and money to figure out new ways to spin opinion and cloak their own role in it. So, I hope I gave you some information, maybe some tactics that are used you didn't know much about that will help you think when you're getting information online, as to whether you can really trust it or maybe should you ask more questions about what you're seeing and reading as you're gathering information and trying to think for yourself.

I hope you enjoy today's podcast. Check out JustTheNews.com and don't forget to subscribe to the Sharyl Attkisson Podcast. Leave a review, share it with your friends and also think about subscribing to my other podcast, Full Measure After Hours and all the Just the News podcasts, wherever you like to listen. And if you like the topics that I talk about in these podcasts, you will love my new book that's coming out at the end of November. It's called Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism. I talked to a lot of news industry insiders about the devolution of news. This is a great book that, not only will you like, but if you have friends or family members who are interested in the topic, great holiday present for them and it could really be eye-opening. I hope you'll support independent journalism and pre-order Slanted wherever you like to order your books. Do your own research, make up your own mind, think for yourself.