President Trump Wants the Senate Intel Committee to Look into Fake News. That’s Exactly What They’re Doing
How our Shifting Information Sources Challenges our Notions of Media
Last week, President Trump again expressed his frustration with the ongoing investigations into Russia’s meddling in our elections. As has become custom, he decided that the best way to address these frustrations would be to tweet through it.
President Trump was almost certainly lashing out in response to two news items, that his Secretary of State had called him a moron, and that the Senate Intel Committee’s Russia probe had expanded, likely continuing its investigation into the 2016 election, along with the possibility of the Trump campaign’s collusion with the Russians, into next year and beyond. In setting a timeline, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr stated that he’d like the committee to make their facts public before the 2018 midterm primaries, which provides him with quite a bit of runway.
The committee has been busy, of course, upon discovering more and more evidence of Russian interference through utilization of social media platforms as a way to stir up animosity and cause chaos. Caroline O. did a fine job in a recent piece highlighting how they went about doing so:
“The content of the Russian-funded ads varied widely. Some messages were aimed at stoking fear and anger towards immigrants and Muslims, and others tried to sow discord among Americans by sending contradictory messages about events like the protests in Baltimore and Ferguson. Other Russian-bought ads promoted Trump as “the only viable option,” while some encouraged Americans to vote for third party candidate Jill Stein. At other times, Russia used social media ads to hide behind false identities and impersonate specific people and groups, including American Muslims and Black Lives Matter.
More recently, it was revealed that Russia also used Facebook ads to organize and promote protests and campaign rallies in the United States.
The Daily Beast reported on September 11 that Russian operatives used Facebook’s event-management tool to plan and advertise political demonstrations on U.S. soil, including an “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally” held in Idaho in August 2016. On September 20, The Daily Beast published a second report linking a series of pro-Trump flash mobs in 17 Florida cities to a so-called “troll factory” in Russia. The August 20, 2016, events — collectively called “Florida Goes Trump” — were described as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob” in support of then-candidate Donald Trump. The flash mobs were organized through the Facebook page “Being Patriotic,” which was shut down after its connection to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency were discovered. According to a U.S. intelligence report, the Internet Research Agency is funded by ‘a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.’”
She goes on to write about how many of those same Russian accounts, not just on Facebook but on Twitter as well, spent the past few weeks stoking the flames of the recent NFL Debate.
In another excellent Arc piece, Nicholas Grossman went into detail about how Facebook acted irresponsibly during the 2016 Election, allowing Russian-linked accounts to take full advantage of a social media platform that feeds users the content it wants to see, fully insulating them in a bubble and reaffirming their beliefs again and again.
Grossman’s critique of Facebook is strong, and his conclusion that the government may need to step in to regulate it, perhaps in same way it regulates television, radio, and other media platforms, is one that tech companies will find unfavorable. That same idea, though, seems to be gaining momentum and legitimacy as the incredible scope of Russian interference becomes clear. Grossman writes:
Maybe we should treat Facebook like a utility. America regulates broadcast radio and television on the grounds that the airwaves are a public good, and we allow private companies to use them. Similarly, the U.S. government created and protects the internet, and European governments created the World Wide Web.
Private companies have advanced the internet in amazing ways, and it would be a mistake to regulate them excessively. But 2016 demonstrates new regulations are in order. At the very least, we should:
- update regulations designed for radio, telephones, and television to account for internet communications
- revise federal election statutes to make it clear their disclosure requirements extend to internet-based electioneering
- require websites to follow the regulation that obligates TV stations to keep publicly available logs of ads they sell to candidates and political groups around election time
- consider ways to hold tech companies responsible for when their algorithms facilitate lawbreaking
- and raise the penalties for violations
You can find the whole piece here.
Some might find these measures extreme, and it will surely be an uphill battle to actually implement this level of regulation, but it may very well be necessary.
Circling back, Trump’s reactions to these developments is not surprising. The investigation is obviously a thorn in his side because it brings into question his legitimacy as President, but there’s another reason it bothers him so much.
Trump prides himself on his social media following. This summer, in another example of the President tweeting through it, he boasted that he has over 100 million followers on his “very powerful Social Media”. Trump, of course, sees this as his way to bypass traditional media and speak directly to the people.
Putting aside the fairly dubious 100 million people claim, this shows that Trump values social media as more truthful than traditional media. Not only is he able to disseminate his messages through their platforms, but he’s reaching real people on the other end. Real supporters who he can interact with, retweet with abandon, and encourage Real detractors who he can lambast, criticize, and both directly and indirectly encourage his followers to antagonize.
It’s becoming obvious, though, that social media and its surrounding ecosystem is, in some ways, much more falsified and distorted than traditional media. Even traditional media with a partisan viewpoint requires actors to appear on screen, responsible parties to disclose their finances, and the correct permits and licenses to be obtained. Social media allows actors to remain in secrecy, creating fake accounts, promoting beliefs and movements they may not believe in while holding ulterior motives, as was the case in last year’s election and is continuing, as Caroline O. pointed out, through our current political climate.
Something Grossman said stuck out to me at the time of writing, and became more relevant upon reading Trump’s tweet.
Social media played a crucial role in Russia’s efforts to influence the election. Creating and disseminating fake news — the actually false kind, not the “I don’t like what it says” kind…”
President Trump, if he’s truly after fake news, seems to be misunderstanding where its coming from. People are getting their information on Facebook, oftentimes from people or entities misrepresenting themselves, who are oftentimes completely fabricating the content they’re promoting. The Senate Intelligence Committee seems to understand this, and is continuing its investigation into how this happened and how to stop it. Even Facebook, after resisting change for months, has been maligned so much recently that that seem to finally understand their need to do something about this issue.
But the President continues to resist, viewing social media as a powerful tool in his repertoire while simultaneously rejecting the notion that it could have been used by a foreign actor to help him to victory. This conclusion is simply not favorable to him, and therefore not acceptable. Instead, he continues to reject reports from traditional, well-sourced, documented media — the kind where its reported that someone called him a moron — in favor of random accounts on Twitter and hyper-partisan websites that play fast and loose with the truth.
How information spreads, how it reaches consumers, and how we utilize the platforms and tools available to us are rapidly changing. The government is right to be taking a long, hard look at this. Rising, largely unregulated entities, including the social media behemoths, are right to take steps to assume responsibility for what appears on their platforms. The people, much of the government, and the companies themselves are taking action to improve the system.
The President seems to be alone in his resistance. He seems to understand the power of social media, and he seems to understand its importance. If that’s the case, why doesn’t he care about the integrity of the system? Is it simply because this conclusion would be unfavorable to him, because it would prove that the Russian government did in fact support his candidacy?
Senator Burr set a goal to conclude the committee’s investigation by the midterm primaries, but this problem isn’t going away. The American people deserve leadership that will truly and earnestly seek to find out the truth about what happened, identify how it happened, and solve the problems that caused it moving forward. At this moment, for lack of understanding or for some other reason, President Trump seems quite resistant to embracing such a role.
