Right-Wing Responsible For Pushing Coronavirus Disinformation ...

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forbes.com

 

..... On Twitter Worldwide, New Report Says

Sean Lawson

6-7 minutes

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A network map from the Graphika "infodemic" report.

Graphika

Conservative and right-wing voices play an outsized role in spreading mis- and disinformation online about the coronavirus pandemic worldwide. This is despite their diminishing share of the overall online discussion between January and March of this year. This is according to a new report released today by Graphika, a company that specializes in using artificial intelligence for digital marketing and the study of online disinformation.

Graphika’s findings show that the U.S. right-wing’s share of Twitter discourse about coronavirus peaked in February but declined in March as more mainstream voices began to take up the issue. Nonetheless, the U.S. right-wing has played a particularly important role in the rise and spread of various forms of coronavirus disinformation.

“Conservative groups have a larger total presence than liberal groups in the disinformation map, and the combined volume of activity from conservative groups is 27%, compared with 8% from left-leaning groups,” the report says. “This indicates not only that there are more right-wing accounts, but these accounts are also more prolifically producing content than their left-wing counterparts.”

Graphika table showing the percentage of coronavirus disinformation tweets from right-wing and ... [+] left-wing groups.

Graphika

Network Analysis Of The Coronavirus “Infodemic”

Graphika’s report is based on an ongoing project to map and analyze what the World Health Organization has called an “infodemic,” an overabundance of online information, much of it false and misleading, about the coronavirus pandemic.

The company began tracking the online conversation in December primarily by collecting data from Twitter. The company has produced a series of network maps that reflect the state of the mainstream conversation about coronavirus on Twitter in January, February, and March. Nodes on the map represent accounts that have used a combination of coronavirus-related hashtags and are categorized and color-coded based on their geographic location and political leanings. The graphs provide a set of visual “snapshots,” the company says, of how the online discourse has changed during the first three months of 2020.

Graphika produced a forth map focused specifically on disinformation. This map was produced by collecting tweets that used a combination of disinformation-related hashtags and, like the other maps, categorizing and color-coding the resulting accounts.

Common Right-Wing Coronavirus Narratives

Graphika identified a number of common themes and narratives being pushed by right-wing Twitter accounts in the United States, Italy, and France in particular. These included racist and anti-immigrant themes and narratives, especially directed at China. 

The report also highlights a substantial overlap between right-wing voices promoting conspiracy theories and health misinformation. For example, the QAnon conspiracy was quite popular among accounts that were also posting coronavirus disinformation, the report found. Similarly, the report noted “that habitual sharers of health misinformation increased their share of voice in coronavirus conversations in February. Of the accounts that exist in both [the coronavirus discussion and health misinformation] networks, 66% sit within the US Right-Wing clusters.”

Finally, Graphika notes the rise of coronavirus-related narratives meant to “stoke geopolitical tensions,” including “undermining trust in global institutions and drawing attention to the failures of other governments, predominantly the Chinese response.” Some of this activity, they said, appears “to be overtly state-sponsored efforts to ‘save face’ abroad, and others appear to be more covert networks of accounts spreading disinformation.”

The report does not contain all bad news, however. It does note that the campaign to push #FlattenTheCurve and related hashtags was successful for a time in mid-March. The campaign was spread mostly by mainstream media, health organizations, and those generally on the left and opposed to President Trump. “The spread of #FlattenTheCurve is a small case study,” the company says, “in the efficacy of science communication that attests to the positive, and likely life-saving, impact of credible information online.”

From Twitter To The Streets

The Graphika report confirms much of what we have been seeing in more traditional reporting over the last several weeks. After some early success, and despite the overwhelming presence of more mainstream voices in the online coronavirus discourse, the right-wing has continued to have an important influence.

The news has been filled with reports of astroturfed, right-wing “protests” against stay-at-home orders around the United States, which have been stoked by the President and Republican politicians. Like right-wing groups worldwide, the President and his supporters continue to promote health misinformation related to coronavirus. They have, at times, gone beyond legitimate criticism of the Chinese government to stoke racism. They have worked to undermine international institutions like the World Health Organization. The President tweeted yesterday that he intends to ban all immigration to the United States, echoing the anti-immigrant sentiments that Graphika noted in their report.

Screenshot of President Trump's April 20, 2020 tweet promising to suspend immigration into the ... [+] United States.

Twitter

As such, Graphika’s report lends support to growing concerns over how widespread right-wing coronavirus disinformation has become. It is not just a U.S. online phenomenon, but rather a worldwide scourge.

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my point is quit getting your health info from pols and talking heads...............

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-conservative-networks-backing-anti-quarantine-protests/2020/04/22/da75c81e-83fe-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html

The anti-quarantine protests seem spontaneous. But behind the scenes, a powerful network is helping.

By

Isaac Stanley-Becker and 

Tony Romm 

April 22, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The ads on Facebook sounded populist and passionate: “The people are rising up against these insane shutdowns,” they said. “We’re fighting back to demand that our elected officials reopen America.”

But the posts, funded by an initiative called “Convention of States,” were not the product of a grass-roots uprising alone. Instead, they represented one salvo in a wide-ranging and well-financed conservative campaign to undermine restrictions that medical experts say are necessary to contain the coronavirus — but that protesters call overkill and whose economic fallout could damage President Trump’s political prospects.

A network of right-leaning individuals and groups, aided by nimble online outfits, has helped incubate the fervor erupting in state capitals across the country. The activism is often organic and the frustration deeply felt, but it is also being amplified, and in some cases coordinated, by longtime conservative activists, whose robust operations were initially set up with help from Republican megadonors.

The Convention of States project launched in 2015 with a high-dollar donation from the family foundation of Robert Mercer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican patron. It boasts past support from two members of the Trump administration — Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development.

It also trumpets a prior endorsement from Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and a close Trump ally who is pursuing an aggressive plan to reopen his state’s economy. Cuccinelli, Carson and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.

The initiative, aimed at curtailing federal power, is now leveraging its sweeping national network and digital arsenal to help stitch together scattered demonstrations across the country, making opposition to stay-at-home orders appear more widespread than is suggested by polling.

“We’re providing a digital platform for people to plan and communicate about what they’re doing,” said Eric O’Keefe, board president of Citizens for Self-Governance, the parent organization of the Convention of States project.

A longtime associate of the conservative activist Koch family, O’Keefe helped manage David Koch’s 1980 bid for the White House when he served as the No. 2 on the Libertarian ticket.

“To shut down our rural counties because of what’s going on in New York City, or in some sense Milwaukee, is draconian,” said O’Keefe, who lives in Wisconsin.

Polls suggest most Americans support local directives encouraging them to stay at home as covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, ravages the country, killing more than 44,000 people in the United States so far. Public health officials, including epidemiologists advising Trump’s White House, agree that sweeping restrictions represent the most effective mitigation strategy in the absence of a vaccine, which could be more than a year away.

Still, some activists insist that states should lift controls on commercial activity and public assembly, citing the effects of mass closures on businesses. They have been encouraged at times by Trump, whose attorney general, William P. Barr, said in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday that the Justice Department would consider supporting lawsuits against restrictions that go “too far.”

Further afield, the protests have been encouraged by some of the president’s allies outside the White House, including Stephen Moore, once considered for a top post at the Federal Reserve.

The swelling frustration on the right coincides with major policy changes in some states, especially those with Republican governors. Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee have all begun relaxing their restrictions in recent days after bowing to pressure and imposing far-reaching guidelines.

The protests are reminiscent in some ways of the tea party movement and the demonstrations against the Affordable Care Act that erupted in 2010, which also involved a mix of homegrown activism and shrewd behind-the-scenes funding.

For the Convention of States, public health is an unusual focus. It was founded to push for a convention that would add a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. That same anti-government impulse is now animating the group’s campaign against coronavirus precautions.

“Heavy-handed government orders that interfere with our most basic liberties will do more harm than good,” read its Facebook ads, which had been viewed as many as 36,000 times as of Tuesday evening.

Asking for a $5 donation “to support our fight,” the paid posts are part of an online blitz called “Open the States,” which also includes newly created websites, a data-collecting petition and an ominous video about the economic effects of the lockdown.

The group’s president, Mark Meckler, said his aim was to act as a “clearinghouse where these guys can all find each other” — a role he learned as co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. FreedomWorks, a libertarian advocacy group also active in the tea party movement, is seeking to play a similar function, creating an online calendar of protests.

“The major need back in 2009 was no different than it is today — some easy centralizing point to list events, to allow people to communicate with each other,” he said.

Meckler, who draws a salary of about $250,000 from the Convention of States parent group, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service, hailed the “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.”

So far, the protests against stay-at-home orders in states including Washington and Pennsylvania have captured headlines and drawn rebukes from some governors and epidemiologists. Experts say a sudden, widespread reopening of the country is likely to worsen the outbreak, overwhelming hospitals and killing tens of thousands.

The protesters so far have not aimed their ire at Trump, though it is his administration’s experts whose guidelines underlie many of the states’ actions.

Trump’s public comments — including his recent tweets calling for supporters to “liberate” states including Michigan, a coronavirus hot spot — have catalyzed some of the broader public reaction. Following those tweets, tens of thousands of people joined Facebook groups calling for protests in states including Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the efforts are coordinated by a trio of brothers who typically focus their efforts on fighting gun control.

Pro-gun activists using Facebook groups to push anti-quarantine protests

In recent days, conservatives have set their sights on Wisconsin, where a few dozen protesters turned out at the Capitol to air their frustrations with Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, after he extended his state’s stay-at-home order until late May. Ahead of the demonstration, Moore, the Trump ally, revealed on a live stream that he was “working with a group” in the state with the goal of trying “to shut down the capital.”

Moore, who served as a Trump campaign adviser in 2016, said he had located a big donor to aid in the effort, though he never elaborated. “I told him about this, and he said, ‘Steve, I promise to pay the bail and legal fees for anyone who gets arrested,’ ” Moore said in the video. He likened his quest to the civil rights movement, adding, “We need to be the Rosa Parks here and protest against these government injustices.”

Moore, who has also worked at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment.

In Michigan, among those organizing “Operation Gridlock” was Meshawn Maddock, who sits on the Trump campaign’s advisory board and is a prominent figure in the “Women for Trump” coalition. Funds to promote the demonstrations on Facebook came from the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is headed by Greg McNeilly, a longtime adviser to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

McNeilly said the money used to advance the anti-quarantine protests came from “grass-roots fundraising efforts” and had “nothing to do with any DeVos work.”

Many of the seemingly scattered, spontaneous outbursts of citizen activism reflect deeply interwoven networks of conservative and libertarian nonprofit organizations. One of the most vocal groups opposing the lockdown in Texas is an Austin-based conservative think tank called the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which also hails the demonstrations nationwide.

“Some Americans are angry,” its director wrote in an op-ed promoted on Facebook and placed in the local media, telling readers in Texas about the achievements of protesters in Michigan.

The board vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, oil executive Tim Dunn, is also a founding board member of the group promoting the Convention of States initiative. And the foundation’s former president, Brooke Rollins, now works as an assistant to Trump in the Office of American Innovation.

Neither Dunn nor Rollins responded to requests for comment.

The John Hancock Committee for the States — the name used in IRS filings by the group behind the Convention of States — gave more than $100,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2011.

The Convention of States project, meanwhile, has received backing from DonorsTrust, a tax-exempt financial conduit for right-wing causes that does not disclose its contributors. The same fund has helped bankroll the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is encouraging protests of a stay-at-home order imposed by the state’s Republican governor, Brad Little.

“Disobey Idaho,” say its Facebook ads, which use an image of the “Join or Die” snake woodcut emblematic of the Revolutionary War and later adopted by the tea party movement.

In 2014, the year before it launched the Convention of States initiative, Citizens for Self-Governance received $500,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation, a donation Meckler said helped jump-start the campaign. Mercer declined to comment.

While groups and individual activists associated with the Koch brothers have boosted this far-flung network, Emily Seidel, the chief executive of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity advocacy group, sought to distance the organization from the protest activity, which she said was “not the best way” to “get people back to work.”

“Instead, we are working directly with policymakers, to bring business leaders and public health officials together to help develop standards to safely reopen the economy without jeopardizing public health,” Seidel said.

But others see linkages to groups pushing anti-quarantine uprisings.

“The involvement of the Koch institutional apparatus in groups supporting these protests is clear to me,” said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University whose research has focused on climate lobbying. “The presence of allies on the board usually means that they are deeply engaged in the organization and most likely a funder.”

Brulle said the blowback against the coronavirus precautions carries echoes of efforts to deny climate change, both of which rely on hostility toward government action.

“These are extreme right-wing efforts to delegitimize government,” he said. “It’s an anti-government crusade.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-saw-the-best-of-america-at-a-peaceful-reopen-rally/2020/04/21/566909b0-8416-11ea-878a-86477a724bdb_story.html

Why I joined the reopening protests

By Mike Jones 

April 21, 2020 at 8:27 p.m. EDT

Mike Jones, a Republican, represents Pennsylvania’s 93rd legislative district in the state’s House of Representatives and is chairman of its Economic Growth Caucus.

This week, I stood on the steps of the state Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa., joined by hundreds of fellow citizens at the peaceful “Reopen PA” rally. Voices cheered, car horns honked and flags waved. While critics will undoubtedly focus on the shortage of masks and lack of social distancing, I saw the best of America: people exercising their rights to free speech and assembly in defense of economic liberty.

As impressive as the demonstration was, though, I couldn’t help thinking how easily it might have been avoided. The novel coronavirus crisis should have been a unifying event, not a divisive one. But it may yet be — if lawmakers here and throughout the country can develop the right sense of economic urgency.

Before I was elected to the state House of Representatives two years ago, I spent more than a decade leading one of the nation’s premier supply-chain engineering firms. Throughout my career, I’ve gained a deep appreciation for the great good wrought by American capitalism and entrepreneurs. So it pains me to see our capitalist system crippled and small businesses in my district closed.

I recently spoke with a barbershop owner who, two months ago, had dreams of buying her own building. Now, she is worried about losing everything. A young couple in my district fears losing financing for their new home because the state won’t allow construction workers to complete it. A local garden-center owner is dumbfounded that he can’t sell seedlings and plants to customers who want to grow their own food and beautify the homes to which they are now confined. Across the state, the unemployment rate is now 25 percent and rising — a level that recalls the worst of the Great Depression.

This devastation is the predictable result of our approach to containing the coronavirus. Of course, a deadly pandemic requires extraordinary measures, and it would be unsafe and irresponsible to expect to continue life as normal. Public health officials bring valuable scientific expertise to an unprecedented challenge. But these public health officials are advisers, not policymakers. It is the job of elected officials to consider their advice seriously and then weigh it against competing concerns, including economic ones.

Unfortunately, many governors are abdicating their responsibility to manage this balancing act, handing over the keys to the health officials. In Pennsylvania, this abdication has brought an unnecessary halt to a host of business activities that can be operated safely and that continue in almost every other state in the nation — including areas with much higher rates of covid-19 infection. The result is that Pennsylvania now has about 7 percent of the nation’s unemployed despite having less than 4 percent of the nation’s population. And there are public-health effects to this joblessness epidemic, too. In our county, for example, our district attorney tells me that opioid overdoses have tripled since the beginning of the shutdown.

In the midst of this crisis, many state legislatures have gone home and relegated all power to their respective governors. In Pennsylvania, we are fortunate: Democrats and Republicans leveraged technology and agreed to a rules change that enables us to caucus and vote remotely. This not only demonstrates the power of bipartisanship; it also enables the legislature to maintain its critically important check on the power of the executive.

While we recognize the importance of deferring to our governor on certain matters, we must also work to avoid replacing a medical crisis with an even greater economic one. This is why I joined with other members of the Pennsylvania legislature to pass legislation that would have allowed select businesses to reopen based on federal guidelines rather than the unnecessarily confusing and illogical ones developed by the governor and his secretary of health.

Gov. Tom Wolf (D) has vetoed that legislation, but I still have hope that we can bring long-term good out of this crisis. Some have compared our current situation with World War II. I find it to be the exact opposite. When we entered the Second World War, the United States did not shelter in place — we went to work. Our businesses led the charge, and Pennsylvania produced more military hardware and supplies than any other state.

Today, we still have a greater diversity of business than any state in the union. The people who rallied in Harrisburg on Monday, and the constituents I represent in York County, want us to make the most of this capability — not because they are indifferent to the well-being of their fellow Pennsylvanians, but because they know that getting our state back to work is the surest way to improve it.