from the turns-out-we-need-trust-&-safety-after-all dept
It’s fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe’s on the other foot. For years, we’ve been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign manipulation on social media was “censorship” and a violation of Americans’ free speech rights. The same crowd that turned researchers into pariahs and shut down entire government offices dedicated to studying foreign influence operations are now… demanding that social media platforms identify foreign accounts?
Laura Loomer, ever the consistent voice of reason, recently posted on X:
After this week, I would like to see X put country tags on X accounts so we know which country someone is tweeting from.
Too many foreigners on X pretending to be Americans for the sake of creating discord and political violence in the US.
It’s totally out of control.
This is the same Laura Loomer who has spent years railing against any kind of trust & safety interventions as “censorship.” But now that foreign accounts might be saying things she doesn’t like, suddenly identifying foreign influence is a great idea?
Loomer’s demand perfectly encapsulates the broader MAGA approach to foreign influence operations: destroy the systems that actually work, then demand magic solutions when the problem inevitably resurfaces. And, of course, this is leaving out the basic things that anyone with an ounce of knowledge about countering foreign misinformation could tell you including (1) foreign misinfo peddlers tend not to appear in a way that lets platforms know where they’re posting from, and (2) even if they did, they’d immediately switch to VPNs or other methods of cloaking their location soon after.
Because for years, many MAGA voices have been screaming that any attempt to study or counter foreign manipulation was an assault on free speech. Remember the hysteria over the Global Engagement Center? The attacks on researchers studying disinformation? The endless, mostly baseless complaints about how Big Tech was supposedly “censoring” Americans at the behest of government agencies?
With MAGA folks in control of all aspects of the government, it was no surprise that they quickly shuttered the Global Engagement Center (GEC) with a bunch of nonsense about how it was against free speech. This ignored the reality, which was that it was created and focused on helping to suss out foreign influence campaigns and to expose them to limit their power.
You know, just like Laura Loomer is now asking to have happen.
Somewhat incredibly, just days after Loomer demanded efforts to identify foreign interference on social media, Marco Rubio’s State Department gleefully announced that the US had withdrawn from an international effort designed to help expose foreign influence campaigns that had been used for years to help expose things like secret ISIS social media campaigns.
Even as the MAGA world is now clamoring for efforts to help expose foreign influence campaigns, they’re still framing efforts that were going on before as… censorship. Here was Marco Rubio lying about the GEC:
Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving. This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.
That ends today. Under the administration of President Trump, we will always work to protect the rights of the American people, and this is an important step in continuing to fulfill that commitment.
This is simply, fundamentally untrue. GEC did not work on silencing or censoring Americans. It worked on helping to expose and counter foreign influence campaigns.
As did many trust & safety and integrity teams across the industry, many of which have been dismantled by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, despite their efforts to expose and limit malicious foreign actors. But because of a bad faith campaign (led by MAGA and MAGA-adjacent people) to paint all trust & safety and efforts to counter disinformation as “censorship” now we’re left in a space where the people who were good at exposing these campaigns are gone… but you have people like Loomer demanding that Elon Musk magically do what he’s spent the last couple of years making sure X could no longer do.
This isn’t just run-of-the-mill political hypocrisy. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what foreign influence operations actually look like and how they work.
So now we have the same political coalition that cheered the dismantling of foreign influence research suddenly very concerned about… foreign influence. It’s almost like they never actually cared about the principle of free speech, but rather about ensuring that the speech they liked wasn’t subject to any scrutiny.
Of course, now, the systems and infrastructure that could actually identify foreign manipulation campaigns in a sophisticated way require exactly the kind of research infrastructure that people like Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee spent months attacking. The very people that Jordan and friends called the “censorship cartel” (something they never were) are exactly the folks that actually have expertise in finding foreign disinfo campaigns.
We’re left with what we’ve got: Loomer demanding that Elon Musk implement some kind of country-of-origin tagging system, apparently unaware that such systems are incredibly easy to circumvent with VPNs, and that building effective counter-measures requires exactly the kind of sustained research and institutional knowledge that her political allies just spent years dismantling.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t spend years screaming that any effort to study foreign manipulation is “censorship” and then turn around and demand that platforms magically solve the foreign manipulation problem. Well, you can, but it makes you look like either a hypocrite or someone who never understood the issue in the first place.
The truth is, dealing with foreign influence operations is genuinely difficult and requires nuanced approaches that balance free speech concerns with the need to maintain the integrity of public discourse. It requires sustained research, institutional knowledge, and yes, sometimes it means that platforms need to make difficult decisions about what content to host and how to label it.
But instead of having that conversation, we got years of performative outrage about “censorship” that effectively neutered our ability to deal with foreign manipulation. And now, when the consequences of that approach become apparent, the same people who created this mess are demanding quick fixes.
Of course, now we’ll probably have to sit through years of these same people “discovering” every other aspect of content moderation and foreign influence operations as if they’re the first ones to think of it.
Filed Under: content moderation, countering foreign influence, disinformation, elon musk, foreign influence, foreign influence campaigns, free speech, laura loomer, marco rubio, misinformation, research, state department
Companies: twitter, x
