Note to Readers: That Eerie Silence

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“THE AI ELECTION”: Forget Russians, domestic terrorists, or “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior.” This year’s censorship hobby horse is AI

Racket readers may have noticed it’s been a bit quiet in here of late. That’s because I’ve been spending the last few weeks on an investigative series in cooperation with another site. What seemed like a cut-and-dried report turned into a bit of a rabbit hole on us; hence the delay.

When I first started publishing the Twitter Files in 2022-2023 along with Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig, Paul Thacker, and others, there was an emphasis on speed. Once we saw phrases like “flagged by DHS,” I knew the project was temporary, and guessed we’d probably need to stay ahead of the news cycle in order to avoid seeing material drown in blowback. So, we set aside some explosive bigger-picture storylines to focus on things that could be confirmed and published quickly. There were also topics we didn’t fully understand at the time.

Some of those broader stories will begin coming out now, hopefully starting this week. There’s a reason for working back through this material now. Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation.

If the recent rush of news stories about the horror of foreign-inspired AI deepfakes (“No one can stop them,” gasps the Washington Post) creating intolerable risk to the coming “AI election” sounds a bit off to you, you’re not alone. This is one of many potential threats pro-censorship groups are playing up in hopes of deploying more aggressive “counter-messaging” tools. Some early proposals along those lines are in the unpublished Twitter Files documents we’ve been working on. Again, more on this topic soon.

Also: beginning around the time we published the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Racket in partnership with UndeadFOIA began issuing Freedom of Information requests in bulk. The goal was to identify inexcusably secret contractors of content-policing agencies like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The FOIA system is designed to exhaust citizens, but our idea was to match the irritating resolve of FOIA officers by pre-committing resources for inevitable court disputes, fights over production costs, etc. Thanks to UndeadFOIA’s great work, we now have a sizable library of documents about publicly-funded censorship programs (and a few private ones scooped up in official correspondence).

We’ll be releasing those, too, focusing on a few emails per batch, and publishing the rest in bulk. There’s so much material that a quick global summary here would be difficult, but suffice to say that the anti-disinformation/content control world is much bigger than I thought, enjoying cancer-like growth on campuses in particular, in the same way military research contracts became primary sources of grants and took over universities in the fifties and sixties. Some of these FOIA documents are damning, some entertaining, some just interesting, but all of them belong to the public. We’re going to start the process of turning them over, hopefully today.

In any case, thanks to Racket readers for their patience. I’m very appreciative of the commitment every subscriber makes, especially in this narrowing media environment, which is why I want to make sure readers understand what’s usually going on when things go dark around here. My idea of a vacation is one or two days. If you don’t hear from me for six, I’m working on something. Back soon, and thanks again.