The Tragic Victimhood of “Disinformation Experts”

On June 8th, the Washington Post ran, These academics studied falsehoods spread by Trump. Now the GOP wants answers, a story about how records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits were wielded as tools of harassment against scholars in the field of disinformation. In photo portraits, Kate Starbird of the University of Washington stared plaintively in the distance, a caption under one: The political part is intimidating to have people with a lot of power in this world making& false accusations about our work. Starbird sits on an advisory committee for the 245,000-person, $185 billion Department of Homeland Security, but perhaps she meant a lot of power in a different sense?

When Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and I first started working on the Twitter Files, none of us knew much about people who did anti-disinformation work. Before it became controversial, these experts didn t seem bashful about security-state credentials. For instance, New Knowledge, the firm profiled by Susan Schmidt last week that authored a Senate report on Russian interference and was caught creating fake accounts in an Alabama Senate race, gained this cheerful description in VentureBeat after raising $11 million for anti-disinformation :

What further distinguishes New Knowledge is that its founders are AI and Homeland Security experts who grew up in the NSA and have worked as security advisers. [CEO Jonathon] Morgan, for instance, was an adviser for the U.S. State Department and published research at the Brookings Institution.

When lawsuits like Missouri v. Biden and then the Twitter Files began shining light on this direction, experts reinvented themselves as scholars or research fellows. That their LinkedIn pages often featured odd gaps, or periods listed as consultants to the military or the FBI, was apparently not important, nor that anti-disinformation is not an academic discipline. Even if they were very new arrivals to campuses, we were expected to show deference to new roles as researchers, much as campaign reporters were asked to stop calling Rick Perry a dummy when he put on glasses.

via www.racket.news

Matt Taibbi is a great writer.