Pirate Wires: Censorship for Profit

By Ashley Rindsberg

• Demand for countering misinformation has exploded since 2016, with startups having raised over $300 million, often with governments as their first and primary customers

• The company NewsGuard, with over $21 million in funding, pressures advertisers, as well as third-party vendors, to blacklist outlets it deems untrustworthy

• Blackbird.AI, which last year raised a $20 million Series B, says it protects 2,000 companies and “national security organizations” from “narrative attacks created by misinformation and disinformation”

• The company Storyzy provides “round-the-clock monitoring” of major social platforms, and will “track and identity disinformation trends and false actors,” for the UK government

• There is little — if any — data showing a causal effect between misinformation and altered electoral outcomes

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“A lot of the research on misinformation-disinformation is shoddy,” said Jacob Mchangama, who heads The Future of Free Speech at Vanderbilt University, whom I interviewed in late August by phone. “It tries to paint a more negative picture of misinformation-disinformation having a more direct impact on democracy than what I think is a more balanced view of it.” People who overestimate MDM’s impact on elections, Mchangama said, treat it as if it were delivered from a hypodermic needle, where it’s injected straight into the veins of a society, when, in reality, most of it is diffuse and ineffective.

Despite this, the effort to characterize MDM as a mega-threat reached a crescendo this year, with the World Economic Forum calling it the greatest short-term risk of 2024, despite wars raging in the Mideast and Russia-Ukraine. “2024 was this year where you had a lot of experts, and also governments, saying because there are two billion people eligible to vote, this is going to be sort of a super-year for elections, but there’s acute danger of democracy being drowned in AI generated disinformation,” Mchangama says. “While there are certainly examples of that, there’s never been a coordinated campaign or attempt to disrupt these elections that we know of.”

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