Bullshit Squared

There’s a famous quote about looking into the abyss. I don’t know what it is. Probably sucks. Anyhow, Mike Masnick of Techdirt threw up all over himself online recently.

It’s always funny when a writer takes off their glasses, puts one leg up on a chair, leans towards the class in a folksy way, and starts talking about “bullshit.” Writing is a bullshit job. As a writer, you’re a senior lead bullshitter in the bullshit factory. Any condemnation of other people’s bullshit always stinks twice as badly, presumably because it’s twice-digested.

This gets at the ultimate issue in both Mr. Masnick’s article and The Intercept article he specifically calls out: the bullshit is about framing. That’s it! That’s literally the entire conflict at hand! Framing, as anybody not stranded on a desert island should know from experience, is not a pure science. There’s no litmus tests to determine whether a framing is fully accurate, fully inaccurate, or somewhere in between.

Read that again: somewhere in between. Validity of a given subject’s framing is not a binary state. It, like gender or how much I like Starburst, is a spectrum. In this case, The Intercept’s framing is suggestive of things in their wheelhouse: government overreach, insider collusion, Orwell, green men from beyond the moon, . Mr. Masnick, in turn, sticks with his wheelhouse—to the extent that being a contrarian ass is a wheelhouse.

Issue 1: Minutes of the Meeting of the Minds

Responding to the Intercept’s framing of “meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit,” Masnick is less than impressed:

This sounds all scary and stuff, but those “meeting minutes” are from the already very, very public Misinformation & Disinformation Subcommittee that was part of an effort to counter foreign influence campaigns.

The first thing I’ll note is that Mr. Masnick, in alleging that meeting minutes are “very, very public,” did not actually link to a site where a member of the public can meaningfully access minutes from the Misinformation & Disinformation Subcommittee. (The full name is actually the Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation Subcommittee.)

Second: what Mr. Masnick is claiming are “very, very public” records do not actually appear on the CISA website as they do in the records related to the lawsuit. There are both meeting agendas/minutes and committee reports/recommendations on the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee (“CSAC”) website, but the document provided to The Intercept contains the following:

1. Subcommittee minutes dated April 12, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 2–4);
2. Subcommittee minutes dated June 14, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 5–8);
3. Draft report to CISA director dated June 22, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 9–13);
4. Subcommittee minutes dated June 7, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 14–16);
5. E-mails between subcommittee participants dated May 25 through May 31, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 17–20);
6. Subcommittee minutes dated May 24, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 21–25);
7. Subcommittee minutes dated May 10, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 26–29);
8. Subcommittee minutes dated April 29, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 30–33);
9. Subcommittee minutes dated March 1, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 34–36);
10. E-mails between subcommittee participants dated April 21, 2020 through March 16, 2022 (Exhibit Q, pp. 37–48).

Contrary to Mr. Masnick’s characterization, only one of these documents appears in substantive form on the CISA website: the (notably non-draft) final version of the June 22, 2022 report to the CISA director.

However, the draft version is definitively not the same as the publicly-available version, as is borne out by those (again, not publicly released) emails provided to The Intercept. Specifically, in a May 31, 2022 email from a redacted individual with a University of Washington email address (presumably Dr. Kate Starbird, identified on public meeting minutes as affiliated with the University of Washington and as a CSAC member) writes that the “recommendations themselves have not substantively changed, but we’ve updated the language per our conversation last week.”

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To head off the inevitable caterwauling about the draft being fundamentally the same as the public version, note the term “substantively changed.” That word is a characterization—or, if you will, a framing. Whether or not there are substantive changes via the “updated […] language” is a qualitative judgment.

In conclusion, Mr. Masnick didn’t actually read what was in the document linked from The Intercept article. If he did, he would be able to see a far longer list of meeting dates and minutes than those provided by CSAC. Mind you, Mr. Masnick accuses The Intercept of “mak[ing] out like this was some nefarious secret meeting” (it wasn’t) “with public minutes” (they aren’t), and accusing The Intercept of “publish[ing] a blurry draft version, making it seem more secret and nefarious.”

Remember that whole framing thing? Mr. Masnick evidently thinks that providing a low-fidelity PDF sourced from a lawsuit is intentionally framing the contents as secret and nefarious. That sounds like a Mr. Masnick problem! He does precisely what he infers The Intercept is doing: ascribing malice to something that isn’t per se malicious.

(I will note here that Mr. Masnick refers to Dr. Kate Starbird in his own article, but does not provide the context that she is presumably one of the authors of e-mails contained in the too-grimy-to-be-facts PDF. In fact, Mr. Masnick does not offer Dr. Starbird’s bona fides for inclusion in his piece at all! Might as well have quoted a stop sign—until you find out she might have a personal interest in the validity of The Intercept’s reporting. I don’t know, seems like a pretty important nugget!)

Issue 2: The Actual Content of the Document

Mr. Masnick asserts that there’s “literally nothing nefarious at all” in CSAC’s report. Mind you, that’s in CSAC’s report. The issue, however, is that The Intercept’s reporting is not limited to CSAC’s report. There are minutes—again, non-public minutes—that I can only assume Mr. Masnick did not read, or otherwise disregarded. His motivation is his alone, but it probably has something to do with communism.

Mr. Masnick makes much hay about the report containing “[n]othing about suppressing.” (Mind you, The Intercept article contains one mention of “suppressed” and two of “suppression,” neither in the context of CSAC’s report or minutes.) However, that’s only true if you look at the report. The March 1, 2022 minutes (Exhibit Q, pp. 34–36), are not quite so cut and dry as it relates to discussions regarding misinformation. An unnamed subcommittee member wondered how to “push the envelope to obtain traction in this area [of misinformation].” Kim Wyman of CISA “stated a recommendation was for social media companies not to promote [disinformation] actors,” while erstwhile head of Twitter safety Vijaya Gadde “stated Twitter utilizes a ‘three strike system’ to de-amplify bad actors.”

Now, whether one characterizes “not promoting” or “de-amplifying” to be equivalent to “suppression” is absolutely up for debate. What is not up for debate, however, is that a process wherein social media companies do something to an individual user is not nothing. The language used in the minutes is vague, and invites precisely this degree of skepticism. Are all users defaulted to promoted and/or amplified? If not, does this process only apply to those users that were previously promoted or amplified?

Mr. Masnick—assuming he ever read these minutes, which I strongly doubt—would be absolutely credulous to think that Ms. Wyman and Ms. Gadde are discussing the mere return of an individual user to a baseline experience. “De-amplify” is, in all reasonability, synonymous with limitation on impressions across the platform. Could one characterize that as suppression? Maybe, maybe not! But Mr. Masnick hasn’t exactly made a stellar case why it absolutely couldn’t.

Next—shocking me to the core of my being—Mr. Masnick actually read the minutes of one of the non-public meetings! Specifically, in reviewing the March 1, 2022 meeting with FBI section chief Laura Dehmlow, Mr. Masnick concludes that a.) The Intercept “takes a single quote out of context” and b.) “Ms. Dehmlow’s use of the phrase that media should be ‘held accountable,’ means by an educated public” (emphasis in original).

Mr. Meslow’s hilarious assertion that media is held accountable by the public in any instance aside, he similarly removes meaningful context that undercuts his point. (As an aside, meeting minutes are themselves often missing useful context, as they are minutes, not a transcript. Whatever.) Ms. Dehmlow’s assertion was that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable” (emphasis added). In what sense can an educated public impact a media infrastructure? Just how educated is this public?

But, more importantly: who is the “we” in that statement? Mr. Masnick apparently thinks it means broader American society, philosopher-kings-in-waiting that wield the tools to undo media infrastructure wherever it may appear. And that’s one reading. The other reading, given the original context that Mr. Masnick sidesteps, is that the “we” is a panoply of United States government apparatuses. This makes sense, considering that the minutes report “Ms. Dehmlow was asked to provide her thoughts or to define a goal for approaching [disinformation].”

As a recap, Ms. Dehmlow—an FBI agent—was invited to the CSAC meeting to provide “a briefing […] regarding the FBI’s Roles and Responsibilities in Combating Foreign Influence” (goofball-ass capitalization in original). This was, to reiterate, not a public meeting. The only “we” present was the CSAC roster and Ms. Dehmlow. Assuming that the “we” in Ms. Dehmlow’s answer shifted to Broader American Excellence Eagle Glory is certainly a reading, but it’s neither the only reading nor the most contextually sensible.

From there, Mr. Masnick takes issue with The Intercept transitioning to a not-at-all-disputed Facebook reporting system for government actors being “wholly unrelated to the paragraphs above it.” That would be true, if one only read the report and the single March 1, 2022 meeting minutes that Mr. Masnick cited. However, the aforementioned statements from Ms. Wyman and Ms. Gadde, in context, show a willingness for private actors to permit the government to step in and recommend action on discrete users based on that private actor’s internal policies.

This gets into a much larger question of whether the federal government is similarly situated as any other user of a social media platform, but let me suggest one thing: it isn’t. It plainly isn’t. For one, the federal government is the federal government. In case you missed it, CSAC had an FBI section chief over for a chat. The public meetings are regularly attended by other members of the alphabet soup of the administrative state. These things aren’t happening in a vacuum. They’re happening in an entirely different place that sucks: Washington, D.C.

But, again, this is about framing. Mr. Masnick is correct that the tools available to federal actors are not meaningfully distinct from the tools available to private citizens. That’s broadly true (ignoring that Mr. Masnick himself concedes that, at least in the context of Facebook/Meta, “law enforcement is viewed as a ‘trusted’ flagger, so their flags get more attention”). The problem, though, is that a number of actions permissible by private actors would be ostensibly impermissible, or at least questionable, if done by an agent of the government. Again, framing.

Issue 3: I’m Bored, Here’s Some Rapid-Fire Bullshit

A debunker-of-a-debunker piece is always going to be voluminous, and now I’m just absolutely tired of going line-by-line here. So, here’s a few random ones as I go, because I simply lack the energy to complete this process:

1. Mr. Masnick says that the CISA email thread that “supposedly […] ‘outlines the process for such takedown events’ — does no such thing.” He then goes on to describe the process: first, CISA gets a note “from the Colorado government,” then “CISA pass[es] information on to Twitter,” and that’s the process. How is this not an outline of a process? Is it because it wasn’t titled “The Official Process For Suppression Of Speech By CISA”?
2. Mr. Masnick asserts that a proposed portal for election officials to report misinformation would be “not all that different from how things work for every day users,” and that the “point of the portal is that if the platforms agree that the content or accounts break their rules they will report back to the election officials” (emphasis in original). This gets to my earlier point that government and private citizen action aren’t 1:1 comparable, and that there might be some differences between a single user reporting a suspected rules violation and a government entity doing the same.
3. The caterwauling about the Hunter Biden story suppression—and fuck it, I’m done being even-handed, it was suppressed, even if it was for “good” or “consistent” or “established” reasons or policies—is precisely that. Mr. Masnick doesn’t like that the story exists. Neither do I. It’s fucking stupid. But: it was suppressed by any reasonable reading of the turn of events, and that suppression followed outreach by the government. That the government didn’t specifically call for its suppression is what people might call “pretextual.” Comes up a lot in cases regarding government overreach. Might be worth digging into!

In Conclusion

This Mike Masnick guy a fuckin clown lol rekt