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Foreword

John Podesta

In the span of a single generation, the internet upended the American media landscape. The internet and social media held out the promise of accessing vast stores of information, building community, and empowering speech. Communications of all kinds were made easier by reducing friction, increasing access, and inducing transparency. The old broadcast model of selling the eyeballs of passive, mostly powerless consumers to advertisers shifted to an audience of amplifiers, editors, influencers, and content curators. But this rapid change with the internet and social media created new substantial threats to our privacy, our national security, and our democracy.

Dipayan Ghosh played a critical role in the American government’s attempt to come to grips with those threats when he served in the Obama White House in the wake of the national security leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013. He was an invaluable contributor to a host of policy initiatives, including reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, advancing new encryption policy, regulating internet market competition, passing net neutrality rules, and implementing crucial economic diplomacy with the European Union.

In the post-Obama era, a new concern has come to dominate the field: the creation and dissemination of fake news. The sheer amount of false information that is spread by lightning-fast social media platforms means that internet media is nearly impossible to fact check. Information promoted by sources that look credible (and many that don’t look remotely credible) spreads like wildfire. Terms of Disservice chronicals a new concern that has come to dominate the field.

The 2016 presidential campaign showed the spectacular dangers of the new media landscape to our democracy. Thanks to the dogged work of Robert Mueller, scores of investigative journalists, and the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, we now have a good picture of what went on.

Russia deployed an eighty-person, multimillion-dollar digital campaign to undermine our fair and free elections by sowing division and spreading disinformation, in particular about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Internet Research Agency, a troll farm with links to the Kremlin, used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram to incite and amplify chaos in the most aggressive election intervention by a hostile power in U.S. history. They sought to suppress left-leaning audiences, in particular targeting African Americans on Twitter and Facebook through pages and posts with titles like “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton,” “Don’t Vote At All,” “Why Would We Be Voting,” “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” and “A Vote for Jill Stein Is Not a Wasted Vote.”

Russian intelligence operatives hacked Democratic Party computer networks and the email accounts of Clinton campaign volunteers and employees, including, most famously, my own. Senior Russian intelligence operatives now under federal indictment stole hundreds of thousands of documents and published them under the cover of DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, through federal indictments and his partially redacted report released in March 2019, confirmed that associates of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign communicated with WikiLeaks and that WikiLeaks was a conduit for the Russian government.

Trump didn’t just watch this happen. He actively supported the release of the hacked documents and emails, even inviting the Russians to steal Clinton’s emails. He also went out of his way to call attention to WikiLeaks, mentioning the website’s name 164 times—an average of more than five times per day—during the final month of the campaign, including during all three presidential debates. By late summer 2016, Trump seemed to have advance warning of what WikiLeaks would be releasing, as evidenced by his conversation with then-deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, as recounted in the Mueller report.

This was an assault on our democracy that was perpetrated by the Kremlin and its cutouts and supported by the current president of the United States.

Political and social scientists are still arguing about the extent to which the Russian disinformation campaign affected the 2016 election. It seems obvious that voting (or not voting) under false pretenses—whether or not voters know they were lied to—is bad for a democracy. Additionally, it is clear that disinformation spread through fake news erodes the foundation of truth that social compacts are built upon.

What is inarguable is that once in office, President Trump began deploying a strategy that has been used by autocrats around the world—labeling anything in the mainstream media that is critical of him or his administration as fake news. The strategy is designed to completely confuse public perception. He’s not just trying to spin the bad news of the day; all politicians do that. He seeks nothing less than to undermine the public’s belief that any news can be trusted, that any news is true, and that there is any fixed reality.

The reaction of social media companies to the spread of disinformation on their platforms during and after the 2016 campaign wasn’t just underwhelming but was also actively harmful to our democracy. Facebook, in particular, reacted to each new revelation with denial, delay, and dissembling to the American public. The company was slow to admit that the platform was used in 2016 by Russia and others to sow disinformation and even slower to admit its impact on the democratic process. Since the election, Facebook has made repeated promises to clean up the site but has taken only the most limited and ineffective steps to regulate the spread of disinformation through its platforms. After hiring a handful of editors to try to keep up with the deluge of disinformation, Facebook fired them and implemented an algorithm that, instead of limiting disinformation, immediately pushed it on to trending lists.

While testifying before Congress in April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to share the full range of the company’s data with researchers so that they can study and flag the spread of possible disinformation on social media platforms. Eight charitable funders pooled $600,000 to create the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants Program to support researchers in analyzing Facebook’s data. A year and a half later, most of the promised data has not been made available. The charities, frustrated with the lack of progress, have started to wind down the program.

So the problem continues into the 2020 election. Facebook, perhaps fearing the wrath of Donald Trump, has adopted a policy that it will not fact-check politicians’ ads at all. In so doing, Facebook has created a safe harbor for any politician running for public office to lie with impunity—an approach no traditional print journalist or broadcaster would embrace.

The United States and the global community must take immediate action to protect citizens from the perhaps unanticipated, but now well-observed, negative effects of a Wild West approach to internet publishing and develop defenses against future challenges. While we know that disinformation affects the functioning of our democracy and can threaten human rights, there are sure to be more issues that emerge as the technology industry continues to evolve. As Terms of Disservice compellingly argues, we need to think about the consumer first through a digital social contract—a policy that attempts to level the balance of power between Silicon Valley, the U.S. government, and individual citizens.