Tracing Brief: Is This Thing Still On?
Tracing Brief: Is This Thing Still On?
#82 We're in a very blind election season
Welcome new subscribers. Our media ecosystem, two years after I started this work, grew far more hospitable to “smear merchants” and rumor-mongering than before the pandemic. It grew more hospitable to laundered disinformation.
Is this how you want to live? The kind of world you want for your offspring, one mired in confusion and fog?
Within the info ecosystem we have now, with more micro-targeted content and less macro-targeted content, I’d have set myself up for failure had I promised rapid-response. So I laid the groundwork for this moment by concentrating on immunity to disinformation. In today’s note, I’m highlighting select issues of TracingVRL worth a second look.
Parallels: 1918 Influenza and 2019 COVID Pandemics
First I want to say that as I research this pandemic and the 1918 Influenza pandemic — which did not screech to a halt in 1920 as history textbook summaries suggest — it becomes more apparent that historical events attributed to WWI were caused in fact by waves and waves of deadly influenza, for which health authorities had no diagnostic test and no vaccine. Adolph Hitler led the infamous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, five years after the Great Influenza started. For this attempted coup Hitler was sent to jail; Germans surely “dodged a bullet” there, right? Historians say as Benito Mussolini rose to power in the 1920s Hitler took notes for his second try. We’re now at five years after COVID started.
Elon Musk Took Over Twitter
Elon Musk purchased Twitter corporation in late 2022. Soon he covered the “w” on the Twitter headquarters marquee as a crude reference to women’s anatomy by spelling out “Titter”. The corporation promoted his cryptocurrency Dogecoin by replacing the Twitter bird with a Doge dog, sending Dogecoin valuation soaring.
In my business accounting class, every reference to successful business owners shows they write out a business plan with a section specifying distribution which for some reason is now called marketing but it’s distribution if your product is information.
Musk and Meta corporation CEO Mark Zuckerberg this last year throttled news distribution in new ways, and they’re changing their policies & practices at accelerating rates as we speak.
Musk, in his early days at Twitter now called “X”, throttled links pointing to substack.com. And it was rumored he filtered out references to “COVID”.
In late 2022 a deranged man named David DePape broke into the home of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and beat her husband in the head with a hammer, which Paul Pelosi miraculously survived. DePape’s posts to Facebook showed he promoted COVID conspiracy theories:
Oct 28 2022 Alleged Paul Pelosi attacker posted multiple conspiracy theories (CNN) - Last year, David DePape posted links on his Facebook page to multiple videos produced by My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell falsely alleging that the 2020 election was stolen. Other posts included transphobic images and linked to websites claiming Covid vaccines were deadly.
Musk published to his Twitter feed after the attack a media artifact floating a false rumor that Paul Pelosi and David DePape were homosexual acquaintances, which was false. Musk deleted the post after news reports of it aired.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta corporation days ago decommissioned a watchdog tool called “Crowdtangle” used by independent misinformation researchers. We have a handful of information overseers right now — Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sindar Pichair, Elon Musk, TikTok’s and LinkedIn’s CEOs — and Zuckerberg just defanged independent deputies by de-commissioning CrowdTangle.
Jul 09 Meta Is Getting Rid of CrowdTangle—and Its Replacement Isn’t as Transparent or Accessible | The social media monitoring tool, which has been used to track misinformation, is set to disappear as elections take place worldwide (Columbia Journalism Review) -
As my last newsletter showed [→], we can beat back disinformation with more news outlets run by human journalists. It was the Washington Examiner that identified to the public in 2019 the two political operatives who seeded a false narrative that Biden had Parkinson’s. And the same two men pushed the rumor in 2024 on the very day Biden signed the “End Parkinson’s Act”. By fingering “smear merchants” Wohl & Burkman, with the Washington Examiner’s report, we were able to halt Wohl & Burkman’s attempts to punish electeds for advancing health research.
We need the Washington Examiner to stay in business.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Intentional or Unintentional Allusions This Week
This week, Zuckerberg released a statement that falsely activates a zing-keyword, “censor,” in a vague letter to Republican leaders of the House Judiciary Committee. Nobody forced Zuckerberg to take down COVID misinformation in the deadly year of 2021, which Zuckerberg now says he feels “regret” for doing. President Joe Biden used the bully pulpit to *implore* Zuckerberg to take down media artifacts that misled people about the benefits of the vaccine while people were dying of COVID at higher rates than the year before.
What is a zing-keyword?
Find this back-catalog issue on the TracingVRL substack website to refresh how zing-keywords work differently from person to person:
Jul 30 2022 Secondary Orality (TracingCOVID) - … An unforgettable article that appeared in a 2007 New Yorker by the scholar Caleb Crain [link→] described how technology might both advance and obstruct our literacy. Crain said something about pre-literate information consumption, written about by Walter J. Ong, that in my experience describes the hangover feeling I have after the worst sessions of doom-scrolling borderless news consumption, ‘According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission.’
Indeed the more I consumed *strictly* through the small viewport in my smartphone, the more I realized I was attempting to store news in my head in an anxious way that raised my baseline irritability.
“Censor” is a zing-keyword. Zuckerberg was not censored. But with this week’s public statement, he leaves the trace impression — intentionally or unintentionally — that he was strong-armed by the government during Biden’s tenure, which Zuckerberg was not. His letter to Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is sparse on specifics, but it used the word “censor” and the word “regret” and falsely suggests that Zuckerberg was curating under force during Biden’s presidency.
See the October 2021 issue of TracingCOVID to understand that Zuckerberg was in no way a victim. 2021 was a deadly, deadly time for specific advertising segments: civil-service men, Black men and woman, and women of childbearing age. This archived newsletter highlights men:
Oct 21 2021 Men’s Health Issue (TracingCOVID) - Byron Webb, 57, registered nurse, died Aug 18; Dr. Ray Dominick, age 59, died Sep 14; Roland Asebedo, age 56, fire chief, died Sep 16; John Garcia, age 51, registered nurse, died Sep 28; Dr. Lind Chinnery, age 65, died Oct 2; Kelley William Frye age 53, firefighter, died Sep 29; Michael Pickering, age 45, firefighter and EMT, was the fourth member of Chicago Fire Department to die of COVID, Oct 10; and William Sekora, age 63, paramedic, who died Oct 13 make up a subset of otherwise healthy men who died of COVID in the Autumn of 2021.
Was Mark Zuckerberg a victim when, while people were isolating at home in 2021, spending more time on his platforms earning his companies higher-than-average profits, Biden publicly and privately asked Zuckerberg to remove media artifacts misleading people about the COVID vaccine?
After David DePape — a man who amplified false COVID vaccine conspiracy theories on his Facebook page — attacked Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer on October 28 2022, MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman was compelled to produce a presentation on the history of news media in America. From 1647 to around 2010, we had a robust journalism ecosystem, what Craig Newmark calls democracy’s “immune system.”
While we’re now in democracy’s immunocompromised era, we’re hanging on. I cleaned up key sections of Zuckerman’s YouTube transcript and published it along with his video to my substack site:
Nov 30 2022 The Digital Public Sphere, From 1647 to Musk Twitter (TracingCOVID) - 0:59 I want to start on something of an uncomfortable note with this talk is I want to talk about a very uncomfortable moment in American history and the history of the public sphere. This is a crime scene photo of uh Nancy and Paul Pelosi's house uh Paul Pelosi as you probably know was attacked in his home on October 28th by a conspiracy theorist …
That was October and November of 2022. Then with the hype of generative AI debuting in late 2022 and early 2023, more journalists were laid off. News outlets like Hoodline.com continue to publish generative-AI authored reports underneath human-sounding first-and-last name bylines. This defies the spirit of the California BOT Disclosure law Governor Jerry Brown signed in 2019.
The BOT Disclosure law was passed on the premise that presenting to human consumers AI-generated chat responses as human-written chat responses was tantamount to fraud. It didn’t cover videos of generative-AI broadcast journalists or generative-AI print news stories or generative-AI songs now playing on Spotify under human-looking first- and last- “artist” names. Should it?
The Term “Antiscience” Protects Fossil Fuels
Some aspects of our information ecosystem have changed for the better in the last 36-48 months. But news consumers who only get compartmentalized news, only get algorithmic news through their screens, who think doxxing only happens to virologists doing lab research fail to see the hybrid topics that emerged this pandemic. And that brings up a final item from the TracingVRL back catalog: the really weird, recurrent coincidences of of antivaxx influencers who vote down renewable energy projects and promote a specific fossil fuel: natural gas a.k.a. methane gas a.k.a. LNG a.k.a. fossil gas otherwise known as gas gleaned from fracking. Please see the now-unpaywalled issue of my April 2024 newsletter, originally titled “That Ukraine Aid Vote”:
Apr 18 2024 Antivaxx and ‘Natural Gas’ (TracingVRL) - …Why “rider” is an anachronism will be clear after the next paragraphs. Because when it comes to vaccine disinformation, when it comes to votes on foreign aid for an American ally like Ukraine fighting a drawn-out conflict with Russia, one under-the-radar interest group nearly always hitches a ride.
That interest group represents an industry that goes by many aliases.
And they’ve fooled a lot of people, even the climate-solutions book club I hosted in the late 2010’s. Even the Sierra Club as recently as 2012.
Natural gas.
Sometimes known as “fossil gas” “liquified natural gas” “LNG” “methane gas” it’s a fossil fuel gleaned from a process that may sound familiar: “fracking.” …
It’s marketed as a “bridge fuel” to get regions away from reliance on CO2. But that marketing doesn’t reveal the destination of that bridge.
Time and again, where the Tracing news crawler surfaced craziest vaccine misinformation theories flourishing, I’ve also seen an all-out brawl taking place in that same jurisdiction over the construction of new natural gas pipelines.
To refresh the memory of long-time readers …
Find the complete and now-unlocked April 2024 newsletter with antivaxx-natural gas media artifacts from in Texas, Tennessee, Florida at this link.
The Reverb is Real
2020 and 2021 were acute-pandemic years. In 2022, a man radicalized by COVID vaccine conspiracies attacked our House Speaker’s husband with a hammer. In 2023, many nonprofits saw their funding collapse when the W.H.O. and U.S. Government ended the formal Pandemic Health Emergency, among other economic shocks, which is a topic for a future newsletter. And in 2024, we’d be wise to acknowledge we’re living through considerable acute-pandemic reverb. But unlike the people enduring 1918-1930 influenza pandemic, we have diagnostic tests, we have vaccines and we have post-infection treatments like antivirals so we can gather, resume full livelihoods and catch up our students on skills like reading and math.
This is my information RX: hang tight, watch Ethan Zuckerman’s presentation, and expect information turbulence in the coming weeks.
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