GENE THERAPY
Of all the potential threats to November’s election, Trump may be the worst.
Great gobs of grant money continue to be magnetized by people qualified to inspect social media for its potentially toxic effects on the looming election, and I was surprised to learn this week that some of these initiatives have begun reporting actual impact.
Impact with one caveat, a caveat the galactic dimensions of which I suspect you’ve already identified and shall be discussed, but impact nonetheless.
The Knight Foundation recently released another $1.7 million in funding to study the impact tech is having on democracy — maybe you remember democracy — to shake out some clarity regarding online free speech, content moderation and internet governance issues. It’s part of some $50 million the foundation has been spreading around, money that has already triggered Carnegie Mellon University’s establishment of the Center for Informed Democracy.
“We’re making a range of bets here,” said John Sands, director of learning and impact for the foundation. “One is that the problems are not well understood. We’re largely operating on conventional wisdom. These grants are really designed at their core to get a baseline of data to work with so that we don’t have to rely on conventional wisdom. We don’t expect academics to design policies or to implement it. We expect them to observe and report their findings independently. On the other side of the equation, we’re making another range of bets that are focused on the translational efforts needed to get the work researchers put out translated into language policy makers at all levels, including on these platforms where policy has almost become institutionalized, can understand and act on.
“Twitter last night banned 7,000 accounts associated with Qanon (an internet wellspring of conspiracy theories and disinformation) and put severe restrictions on another 150,000 accounts. When Twitter makes policy pronouncements like that it has downstream effects that accrue to all of us. When decisions like that are made, we want to make sure they’re supported by the research our scholars are spinning out now.”
This kind of tangible result could suggest the 2020 election hasn’t already been lost to the Russians, who doubtless curdled the 2016 edition and were back on the phone with the Oval Office as recently as Thursday.
Still, there is strong evidence a legitimate result is attainable.
“Carnegie Mellon, other places, agencies like the NSA, are actively putting out code to identify bots that are amplifying (disinformation) and repeating it and targeting people who might be influenced by it,” said Matthew Schmidt, an expert in national security, politics and Russia at the University of New Haven. “They, of course, are doing work to spot election tampering in voting machines and things like that — if there’s a weak spot. They look for statistical anomalies in the voting patterns.
“Like most things in this country, it’s patchwork, it’s hit and miss, but I do believe that overall, the election integrity will be there.”
This would be a good spot to re-post for everyone the Rules of Trumpland: 1) Anything President Donald Trump says is true. 2) Any truth Mr. Trump doesn’t like is fake. 3) Any questions, see Rules 1 and 2.
It hasn’t exactly gone without notice that the president and his campaign are not prepared right now to accept an unfavorable result in November. First, there was Mr. Trump’s response when Fox’s Chris Wallace asked him if he might not accept the results of the election (thereby elevating the idea from preposterous and unconstitutional to perfectly plausible): “I have to see,” Mr. Trump blurted. “I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”
In a statement issued Thursday, Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, who once derided the very notion as some kind of Joe Biden fever dream, did a perfect 180: “If someone had asked George W. Bush and Al Gore this same question in 2000, would they have been able to foresee the drawn-out fight over Florida? The central point remains clear: in a free and fair election, President Trump will win.”
I refer you again to Rule 2 in Trumpland.
The likelihood that Mr. Trump will regard even a lopsided loss in November as fraudulent has just increased dramatically, a problem that dwarfs anything nefarious currently bubbling away on the internet or on the Moscow hotline.
“The truth is that America’s national security is in its political stability and its economic stability,” said Mr. Schmidt, who was appointed to the U.S. election monitoring delegation to Ukraine in 2014. “And that rests on predictability. Right now its political predictability is that the rules are such that the losers of an election in a democracy will accept that loss and not engage in armed revolt. This isn’t about [Mr. Trump] giving the Russians the codes to our nuclear weapons. In a sense, it’s much worse than that. That’s what I worry about.
“The president and his supporters are the weapons of the disinformation campaign. They play into it; they repeat it; they amplify it; they don’t deny its accusations. For people like me, who’ve studied the Soviet Union for a lifetime none of this is new. This is what the Soviet Union did with pamphlets and fliers and shooting journalists and all sorts of things for 70 years, but now it’s just amplified with artificial intelligence and the platforms of social media.”
That’s where we are 101 days from Election Day. It won’t take that long for Mr. Trump to indicate in all clarity how he intends to answer this terrible, once unthinkable question.