Fake-o-nomics and Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
#80 Fake raw milk popularity, fake COVID cures, fake news writers. What're the consequences if we keep this up?
Publishing debunks of bird flu misinformation and COVID misinformation in this environment — where digital disinfo warriors are reportedly funded and keyboard-ready to pump out re-bunks of what you just debunked — feels like packing buckshot into a catapult harness aimed squarely at your own people. And if you write about public health, “my people” and “humanity” are the same groups.
Which is one reason I’ve been publishing more content strictly to paying subscribers, like the bird flu immunology hypothesis bulletin [→] that went out two weeks ago. And the clips from news outlets which laundered misinformation, that I listed in the Antivaxx Outbreak of June 2024 vertical [→] I published this week. (Thanks again to paying subscribers! Without you, I’d be in the dark as to whether people mindlessly scroll these newsletters or find actual value in them. Free signups, if you “join” at the paid tier, you’ll now get *limited-edition swag* →)
Contents:
Introduction
China-US & China-UK: Parallel Crossfightings
The Medium is the Candidate
COVID Outlaw Caucus
Accusations Rewarded With Headlines
Origin Debate Origin Debate Origin Debate Origin Debate Round and Round
Puerto Rico Is Getting Hammered
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So while the tangible expenses of this project are few, the opportunity costs of being a “journalist” are higher. One must alternatively swap “journalist” with “content writer” on their resume.
A recent potential employer abruptly 180’d from saying I was “overqualified” to “too inexperienced” and canceled my interview via text while I was behind the wheel to start the car to drive to it. And her LinkedIn job title, which I saw the next day when I logged on to decline her invitation to connect, was “AI Storytelling Director” for a corporation. It’s possible she saw my critiques of AI vagueness, which abounds during AI hype cycles, in the last newsletter, #76 ‘Not Hot Dog’. And that possibly turned her off to hiring me.
Social License
Which brings me to a term I used two newsletters ago but left unexplained. And that term is “social license” to operate or social license to practice. And if some of these generative-AI corporations are disbursing grants – I’m not saying they were disbursing grants, I also lack proof that they’re not paying out grants – to healthcare institutions, or colleges or businesses, in exchange for the use of Machine Learning technology marketed as “AI”, that generative-AI company could be furtively increasing their own social license to practice. Here is one “social license” definition:
Sep 06 2023 Social License to Operate (SLO): Definition and Standards (Investopedia) - “The social license to operate (SLO), or simply social license, refers to the ongoing acceptance of a company or industry's standard business practices and operating procedures by its employees, stakeholders, and the general public. SLO is created and maintained slowly over time as a company builds trust with the community it operates in and other stakeholders. In order to protect and build social license, companies are encouraged to first do the right thing and then be seen doing the right thing.”
I could swear I heard a healthcare worker say on a podcast their employer received a grant from an “AI” company before they and their colleagues were suddenly offered the option to delegate generative-AI chatbots to interact with patients. But I’m unable to find documentation in my notes this happened, and my attempts to get my grant-hunch confirmed got me, at worst, non-denial denials from the podcast hosts1. And the institution that hosts this podcast, is funded by grants. It’s a good podcast, but they’re not journalists. They’re doing investigative work, but they’re academics, and work by different credos. So I hope to spur a conversation with newsies as to how they/you respond when, hypothetically, a funder like an advertiser requests a scrubbing of articles from your site, what would you disclose to readers?
That’s what I’ve been thinking the last year, though, when reading that Apple didn’t pay OpenAI2 for the use of their technology in a deal announced weeks ago. I’ve been thinking OpenAI doesn’t need money right now, as much as what OpenAI corporation may need is people seeing Apple endorsing generative AI.
These are additional definitions of social license to operate:
Jun 06 2017 Social license to operate: Legitimacy by another name? (New Frontiers/Nouvelles Frontières) - “As reflected in this epigraph, social license is not a new concept per se. In fact, social license has long been understood to play a vital function in society whereby social norms can precede and supersede legal rules.1 In this case, the community tolerates the drunk in exchange for his role in speaking truth to power. Alongside this older conception, however, over the past two decades an allied concept of social license to operate (SLO) has emerged, especially in the context of mining, oil and gas development, and other resource-related projects (Gehman et al. 2016; Raufflet et al. 2013).
Jan 15 2016 The Social License to Operate (Journal of Business Ethics) - “An SLO can be defined as a contractarian basis for the legitimacy of a company’s specific activity or project.”
So when I hear of another company incorporating generative AI into their product line where that type of technology would only make their products less reliable3, I do wonder if they received a grant from a company such as OpenAI. Said grant could be paid without the recipient knowing it has anything to do with increasing social license to violate copyright & intellectual property laws in order to attain generative AI training material. I have no proof that any company received such a grant from an “AI” corporation. I also lack proof such grants didn’t happen.
There’s a few double-negatives in that last paragraph! Which brings me to the house of mirrors that is our current disinformation environment.
FEEL THE UNREALITY
I decided early on I wanted to lead a disinformation-tracing initiative, because some new-agey elders I knew when I was growing up would say to me things like “every adult is responsible for creating their own reality” which drove me mad and propelled me into years of estrangement, especially during the 2010’s. But I reconnected with those elders who stopped professing that “create your own reality” instruction around 2017 or so.
‘Appeared out of nowhere’
And while I knew I wanted to lead a disinformation-dispelling project, it’s growing more difficult by the week to discern reality. You hear people everywhere, regardless of political persuasion, say such-and-such trend “appeared out of nowhere.” Like Congress’ readiness to ban TikTok being a sign of uniquely American jingoism, when in fact India already banned the social platform4. Or Donald Trump claiming transgender people didn’t exist until a few years ago, vowing to gut the civil rights of trans people should he be elected 5
Facebook: To start with a small example of our current unreality, a high school friend of mine had her Facebook account hacked into by an impersonator. It started in early May, the day an active-shooter threat was called into her 12th-grade-son’s high school. This hacker, under my friend’s name, locked her out and prolifically published posts hyping cryptocurrency. All this started on the day parents were frantically logging onto their regional PTA Facebook groups to get updates on the danger their teens were in as helicopters swarmed their town for hours on end. This friend later told me she emailed Facebook 50 unanswered requests that month demanding they either let her back into her old account or disable it permanently. The social platform finally de-commissioned the old account, and at least some contacts thought it was really her that suddenly had a crypto obsession. Those weeks happened to precede the May 31st vote in Congress to defang the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) authority to regulate digital currencies7.
Unreality feels like you can’t feel anything. It’s like metaphorically circling your perpendicular arms, helicopter-style, as if blindfolded, hoping to hit the edges of something factual.
Zombie newswriters: Take the Hoodline news site, which once published the work of S.F. Chronicle reporter Nuela Sawyer. Now Hoodline publishes articles produced by generative AI, but it prints those articles under human-sounding first and last names as bylines6. Alongside those bylines are microscopically small “AI” badge icons. That sounds like misrepresentation of bot-authored content, on behalf of the Hoodline news site’s owners. Misrepresentation could count as fraud, a concept the United States inherited from English common law, a subject few adults 53-and-under can speak confidently about given the lack of civics instruction imparted onto 7th- and 8th-graders after the Baby Boomer cohort graduated middle school.
Unreality feels like throwing punches in a boxing ring where your opponent is shrouded in fog, but they can see you clearly. Of course, it only feels that way. Because in fact disinfo trolls-for-hire live fulltime in unreality. They only seem alternately much smaller then much bigger when you can’t see them.
All these consequential subtleties are lot to ask of the voting public to take in. Which is why we need people to stay on this beat who can make it accessible, so we can move past it. That’s what I aim to do through this outlet and newsletter.
Anyway, sensemaking just the first section of this newsletter, “Parallel Crossfighting” below, only four newsclips deep, feels like standing inside the strobe light room of a nightclub, with alternating slants of the story coming clear each time one re-reads it. Only it was in broad daylight that I put that section together. The experience sent my showered-and-caffeinated sober self grabbing the edge of my standing desk, to steady from the weaving confusion hangover I got navigating from the first impression of this narrative – that the U.S. Pentagon was caught by Reuters having committed unjustified disinformation campaign against innocent peoples – to the much different second impression. It turned out a current Pentagon spokesperson fully owned up to, and defended, the operation within the original Reuters report which “broke” the story this June. Pentagon spox said the 2020 initiative was retaliation to a disinfo campaign started by China in the early days of the pandemic, a China-propagated disinformation campaign which claimed SARS-CoV-2 originated in the U.S. and escaped containment due to U.S. government negligence. In fact the COVID-19 virus originated in China.
And don’t get me started on the fact that my most news-ritual-practicing friends don’t believe me when I tell them antivaxx O-G Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is on the ballot in California, positioning him to tip the state’s 54 electoral votes away from Joe Biden to Donald Trump, or vice versa. But RFK, Jr. really is on the November ballot here.
This newsletter is meant to be like a magazine with a user interface made friendly for resumption-reading, so please keep it in your inbox, read a section, close it and read another section later. At your own pace. And please, please get your TracingVRL swag by donating to my fundraiser [→] and help send unreality into retreat.
China-US & China-UK: Parallel Crossfightings
Proceed and read carefully. This is not the easy-to-categorize racism it appears to be on the surface. A current U.S. Pentagon spokesperson stands by the disinfo counteroffensive they conducted during 2020 under President Trump and continued under President Biden.
Jun 18 Philippines ex-vaccine czar doubts alleged US-led ‘anti-vax’ campaign (The Phillipine Star) - Philippines’ former presidential peace advisor Carlito Galvez doubted the allegations made in the Reuters report, and maintained by a current Pentagon spokesperson. ”’I am not aware of anything like this since all countries, through their embassies, are trying to help us to acquire available vaccines in the market,’ he said. ‘As far as I can remember, most of our friends and allies even said that the best vaccine is the vaccine (on) our shoulders, meaning, whatever vaccine we had and (was) available, we have to take it immediately.”
=>Wedge Division Driven by Alleged China Spy in Britain
A lawyer named Christine Lee that Britain intelligence alleged in 2022 is working espionage for China donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to a Labour Party MP (a congressman.) Lee’s attorney is looping the Labour party MP into Lee’s accusations against the ex-Prime Minister. Lee’s lawyer says she’s suing Britain Intelligence agency M15 for unspecified damages.
Jun 17 Spy alert diverted from UK PM COVID party, court told (Bendigo Advertiser Australia) - “In January 2022, MI5 sent out an alert notice about lawyer Christine Lee, alleging she was ‘involved in political interference activities’ in the United Kingdom on behalf of China's ruling Communist Party. … Lee is now suing MI5 for unspecified damages, arguing the agency had acted unlawfully and unreasonably.” “At an Investigatory Powers Tribunal hearing on Monday, her lawyer Ramby de Mello read out a message sent to Lee from Barry Gardiner - an MP for the opposition Labour Party who said he had received hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations from her - in which he queried MI5's motives.”
Jun 14 Pentagon Stands by Secret Anti-Vaccination Disinformation Campaign in Philippines After Reuters Report (Military.com) - “Lisa Lawrence, a Defense Department spokeswoman, did not deny Reuters' reporting on the operation, which was done under the administration of former President Donald Trump and continued for some time under the Biden administration. ... Lawrence also echoed Reuters' reporting, saying, ‘China [in 2020] initiated a disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.’”
Jun 14 Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic (Reuters) - “A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military ‘uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.’ She also noted that China had started a ‘disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.’ In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it has long maintained the U.S. government manipulates social media and spreads misinformation.”
The Medium is the Candidate
Apr 29 Poll: Biden and Trump supporters sharply divided by the media they consume (NBC News) - “These are voters who have tuned out information, by and large, and they know who they are supporting, and they aren’t moving,” Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt told NBC News. “That’s why it’s hard to move this race based on actual news. They aren’t seeing it, and they don’t care”.
COVID Outlaw Caucus Showing Bravado
The word “conspiracy” needs rehabilitation. Some people actually conspire to commit crimes. Like in these two examples.
Jun 18 Midwife pleads guilty to destroying 2,600 COVID-19 vaccines and issuing fraudulent cards (WTVC ABC 9 Chattanooga TN) - “An upstate New York midwife pleaded guilty on Monday to for her role in giving out thousands of COVID-19 immunization cards to people who never received the vaccine, prosecutors said.” “Breault and her co-conspirators also made over 2,600 false entries into a state database that tracked COVID-19 vaccine distribution.” “Breault's lawyer said Monday that his client acted out of a ‘sense of profound concern’ about the impacts of the vaccination requirements.“
Jun 07 Bag of cash doesn't stop jurors from convicting 5 of 7 defendants in $40 million food fraud scheme (WLWT NBC 5 Cincinnati OH) - This news story begins with footage of President Biden speaking on the COVID aid fraud inspector generals he re-hired who were fired under President Trump. “A jury convicted five Minnesota residents but acquitted two others on Friday for their roles in a scheme to steal more than $40 million that was supposed to feed children during the coronavirus pandemic. The case received widespread attention after someone tried to bribe a juror with a bag of $120,000 in cash.”
Accusations Rewarded With Headlines
Jun 15 Greene alleges Fauci committed crimes against humanity with COVID response (The Hill) - “Dr. Anthony Fauci should be tried for crimes against humanity,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told an audience at a political conference, leading to the crowd chanting, “lock him up,” The Hill reported.
Jan 14 Senator Rand Paul calls for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be sent to PRISON over 'dishonesty' on how Covid started (Daily Mail UK) - The Daily Mail quotes Sen Rand Paul (R-KY) saying of Fauci, "For his dishonesty, frankly, he should go to prison. If you lie to Congress, and you’re dishonest, and you won’t accept responsibility. For his mistake in judgment, he should just be pilloried. He should never be accepted."
=>More on Senator Rand Paul
Sep 09 2013 2013 BRI Lecture Series: Rand Paul at University of Louisville (Benjamin Rush Institute YouTube Channel) - Rand Paul: "I would sometimes spread misinformation. So and this is a great tactic this information can be very important to— one time we're in the library and we're studying for a path test and so we just started spreading the rumor that we knew what was on the test ‘and it's definitely all about liver everything there's going to be a vast majority question all about liver’ so we tried to trick all of our competing students in over studying for the liver and not studying for the kidney and every other organ. But that's my advice misinformation works."
Origin Debate Origin Debate Origin Debate Origin Debate Round and Round
If I were China’s leadership, and had the choice between my country appearing a) formidable and dangerous or b) clumsy and dangerous, I’d choose the first option. I’d want my leadership to appear cunning.
Similarly, if I were a director of a big agriculture operation, I might want the origin debate to point away from the wet market theory. The theory that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from nature. Because the lab-leak origin theory would buy agriculture operators more time before they had to face up to paying to spread out the animals at densely populated so-called “factory farms” in which virus particles like H5N1 can shed from host to host, multiplying and mutating inside each host, to the point the avian flu could spread to and infect other species like mice and cats, dogs or humans. What big agriculture director would want to even think about the COVID-19-causing virus having emerged from nature? It’s human, probably, to not think ill of your own profession.
The heuristics of that New York Times OpEd:
An Opinion piece promoting the lab-leak COVID origin theory appeared recently in the New York Times. It was properly labeled “Opinion” and was not presented as an objective news piece. The OpEd was authored by an academic who is not a virologist. This academic is currently promoting her mainstream-publisher produced virus-hunting book. A book is not a peer-reviewed paper in an academic journal. Author Alina Chen’s Wikipedia page shows her preprint contending the virus originated in a lab was never accepted or published in peer-reviewed journals. Moreover, critics contend her OpEd broke no new ground in the origin debate. And breaking new ground is a criteria that new academic journal articles are supposed to meet if they’re to be published.
This OpEd shared a characteristic with the disputed Cochrane journal study that asserted masks don’t make a difference in whether someone contracts COVID: far more citations than should be necessary for what it’s arguing.
Maybe the virus originated in a lab. Virologists and immunologists on This Week in Virology maintain it originated in nature. Neither side is breaking much new ground in this circular conversation. But certain parties stand to benefit if people believe the virus originated in a lab.
Puerto Rico is Getting Hammered
Jun 06 2024 Puerto Rico Is so Hot This Week, It’s Astonishing Some Meteorologists | Parts of the U.S. territory reached a “life-threatening” heat index of 125 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, driven by a combination of an intense heat dome, El Niño and climate change. (Inside Climate News) -
Jun 19 [Translated: ] COVID-19 positivity rate reaches new record and hospitals take restrictions (El Nuevo Dia | Puerto Rico) -
Jun 20 [Translated: ] More difficult to get Paxlovid as COVID-19 positivity rises (El Nuevo Dia | Puerto Rico) -
Jun 26 [Translated: ] CDC issues alert due to increase in dengue cases (Telamundo | Puerto Rico) - [Translated: ] The World Health Organization declared an emergency in December and Puerto Rico declared a public health emergency in March. Dengue remains less common on the U.S. mainland, but so far this year, in all 50 states there have been three times more cases than in the same period last year.
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’From Russia With Lies’
People who host Russian exchange students where newspapers have a foothold in their metropolitan area may experience this.
Oct 21 2011 From Russia With Lies (New York Times) - “But then it occurred to me that a great number of Putin’s constituents were born during or after Perestroika. …They didn’t grow up with only two major newspapers, The Truth and The News, or know the standard joke that there is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News. They never had an Aunt Polya to teach them about vranyo. While I envy this uncommunist generation, I do see one deficiency: They have lost the ability to detect a lie.”
Notes
1 Jun 13 - Podcast hosts answer questions I didn’t ask. I asked: Did DAIR funders request a transcript scrub? (Mastadon indieweb.social) - This is probably a legit denial by the hosts of the Mystery AI Hype 3k podcast. But their answers meet the technical definition of non-denial denials.
2 🎁 Jun 12 Apple to ‘Pay’ OpenAI for ChatGPT Through Distribution, Not Cash (Bloomberg) - “When Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and his top deputies this week unveiled a landmark arrangement with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone, iPad and Mac, they were mum on the financial terms.”
3 May 23 2024 Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza (The Verge) -
4 Apr 26 2024 These are the countries where TikTok is already banned (Associated Press) -
5 Feb 01 2023 Trump Vows to Gut Transgender Rights if Reelected President (The Advocate) - “Trump, who announced his presidential candidacy in November and has seen his influence weaken in the Republican Party, then went on to say that transgender people didn’t exist until ‘a few years ago.’ ‘No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender, a concept that was never heard of in all of human history. Nobody's ever heard of this,’ he said.”
6 🎁 May 12 2024 AI is helping to destroy local journalism | Hoodline’s devolution from community journalism to farmed AI content raises existential questions about how we get news (San Francisco Chronicle) - “Now, it seems, Hoodline has started using artificial intelligence to produce most of its stories, which are aggregated from other news sites like the Chronicle. While CEO Zack Chen maintained to the Chronicle that humans still manage much of the content, there’s a catch. Leticia Ruiz, whose byline is featured at the top of a story about the weather, isn’t a real person. Nor is Nina Singh-Hudson, who …”
7 May 31 Congress blocked SEC guidance on crypto as industry lobbying surged (Open Secrets) - “Amid a lobbying blitz by the cryptocurrency industry, Congress voted for a resolution to overturn a Securities Exchange Commission bulletin discouraging banks from holding cryptocurrency assets. Joined by 32 congressional Democrats, House and Senate Republicans unanimously voted for the joint resolution to block an SEC policy bulletin giving guidance on cryptocurrency earlier this month.”