Misinformation Machine

Silicon Valley loves to tout its expertise in disrupting legacy company business models to force technological change. The Valley’s intellectual elite don’t have much to say about what happens when their technological transformations create more harm than good.

Steven Brill skillfully scrutinizes the less flattering scenario of major internet powers in his new book, The Death of Truth, and he paints an unflattering picture. The thrust of Brill’s subtitle pretty much sums it up: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World -- and What We Can Do. Overall, Brill’s book represents a stinging indictment of how the major internet companies created a lucrative business model that finances a sprawling net of misinformation “news” sites that polarize America with dire consequences.  

“This is a book about how facts – truths – have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country and globally,” Brill warns in the opening pages. “The diminishing belief in truths, in favor of ‘alternative’ facts or even conspiracy theories, has massively eroded trust around the world,” he says, pointing to a lack of faith once respected institutions, professional experts, “and in our own ability to solve our communities’ problems. As a result, civil society is unraveling.”

Listen to an audio sample of The Death of Truth on the publisher’s website:

photo by Camilo Jimenez

Even to someone who has followed these issues closely, Brill’s book is revealing. As the co-founder and co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that objectively rates the reliability of news and information websites,” Brill builds upon reporting that he and his staff have done since he and his co-founder, Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, started the company in 2018. In the spirit of full disclosure, a close friend of mine, James Warren, works as a top editor there.  

Friendships aside, this is an important book that covers known and unknown chapters in the disinformation narrative, ranging from the election denying campaign orchestrated by supporters of former President Donald Trump to some fascinating journalism.

In one section, Brill capitalizes on great reporting by NewsGuard staff journalists such as McKenzie Sadeghi to profile John Mark Dougan, a fugitive Florida deputy sheriff and former U.S. Marine granted asylum in Russia after being targeted in America by law enforcement in a computer hacking scheme. Once in Moscow, Brill reports, Dougan adopted the persona of a disaffected Western journalist who spreads anti-American propaganda and misinformation in bogus stories that reached a global audience of 37 million views. I can tell you from personal experience, the Russian propaganda is highly effective. Brill can testify to that, too. He became one of Dougan’s targets.  

“On Friday, March 13, 2023, a thirty-one-minute video was posted on YouTube with the headline U.S. Govt. Using Third Parties to Censor Free Speech and Spread Disinformation.

“Reading from a teleprompter and sitting in front of a backdrop showing photos of what appeared to be war carnage,” Brill says the narrator John Dougan began by “accusing the US government of spreading massive amounts of disinformation. Speaking calmly with a plain American accent, and clearly at ease using the teleprompter, he then explained that a new enemy was assisting the American government in its disinformation campaigns.”

Dougan then attacked Brill and NewsGuard as one of the new third-party enemies the government uses in “egregious acts of censorship.” He also accuses the company of launching a “smear campaign against him.”

Actually, in one of its misinformation reports, NewsGuard’s journalists had tied Dougan to a pro-Russia propaganda machine that aired false reports of Ukrainian genocide against Russian speakers during the war then raging in Ukraine. Dougan had evaded YouTube’s ostensible ban on reporting by RT, a notorious outlet for Vladimir Putin’s misinformation machine on the war he started in 2022.

“Contrary to Dougan’s claim, Brill reports, “NewsGuard was not acting on behalf of the U.S. government.” The service had issued one of its periodic public reports nineteen days earlier declaring: “Full- length Russian propaganda films justifying the war proliferate on YouTube despite the platform’s ban on Russian-state funded media.”   

The full story of Brill’s exchanges with Dougan are far more complex than I can detail in a review. The Death of Truth reports that Dougan: publicized pictures of Brill’s home; staged a false impersonation of an FBI agent; leveled allegations that led to investigative threats against NewsGuard by the House Judiciary Committee headed by Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican and ally of former President Donald Trump; and generated anonymous email threats such as this one:

‘WE THE PEOPLE AREN’T GOING TO SIMPLY SHUT YOU DOWN. WE ARE GOING TO BURN YOU DOWN AND REMOVE EACH EMPLOYED ENTITY FROM BREATHING VIABILITY.”

Brill’s stories about NewsGuard and its’ struggles to create a sorely needed rating system for media are both intriguing and frightening. To my mind, though, the real value in The Death of Truth is Brill’s detailed explanation of how a three-paragraph amendment to a 128-page bill passed by Congress in an early morning August 1995 vote led to changes in the media’s business model that made misinformation a huge lucrative business that will be hard to stop.  

Lawmakers intended the three-paragraph Section 320 of the Communications Decency Act to empower and free online information providers to serve as “Good Samaritans” able to screen indecency and offensive material for their internet customers.

Instead of protection, Brill reports, Section 320 “shielded the internet companies from being sued for posting harmful content that might slip through whatever screening they tried to do, or from being sued by someone aggrieved by any content they blocked through their Good Samaritan efforts.” In other words, unlike newspaper or broadcast news outlets who could be sued for libel for willfully publishing wrong or damaging information, the new law gave online platforms a relatively free hand to do as they pleased.

Brill dissects how online information providers like Google married their newfound freedoms with a programmatic advertising business model they perfected, revolutionizing advertising and making misinformation an incredibly profitable business. Indeed, the same freedom from responsible regulation that made the internet a place for the exchange of new views and ideas created the misinformation nightmare we live with today.

Brill skillfully dissects how the Googles of the world gradually removed the human touch from the ad buying process. Instead of professionals determining where ads were placed, internet companies employed computer wizards with algorithms programmed to buy advertising in a bid and ask system agnostic to where the ads ran. On one side of the platform, Brill says in grossly simplified explanation, is someone, normally a recent college graduate, called a programmatic specialist who has access to all available advertising space on every page of every site in the world that the platform has assembled as its inventory. On the other side, sits is an equally youthful specialist who snaps up the ad inventory at the best available price without disclosing where the ads will run.

In one of several telling examples of what can happen, Brill showed how GEICO, a giant American insurance company controlled by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, ended up as a leading advertiser on Sputnik News, a Russian disinformation site controlled by the Kremlin.

“It wasn’t that the champion of American capitalism had an alter ego who woke up every morning wondering how he could help finance Vladimir Putin’s global propaganda network” Brill wrote. “Nor was it because a marketing executive at GEICO had decided that advertising on the Russian disinformation outlet was a good idea.” The ad was placed there by a programmatic ad system that is now the dominant medium for websites, social media platforms, mobile devices, streaming television and increasingly on podcasts. 

Brill’s book is chock full of stories and warnings about where we are heading as a nation. To his credit, Brill acknowledges the book could be seen as an attempt to promote NewsGuard as one of the few rating systems designed to educate consumers about the reliability of the media. Brill is a seasoned entrepreneur who has started numerous innovative journalism projects. Although the rating system he and Crovitz is far from perfect, it’s probably the best thing out there, and I doubt promoting NewsGuard was his main motive. His outrages flow through the pages of The Death of Truth and he bemoans what is happening on the nation’s media landscape, particularly with the specter of Artificial Intelligence looming on the horizon. In a last section called Resurrecting Truth – What You Can Do, most of his prescriptions involve changes that involve politics more than the media.

“Over the last two decades, we have seen the (political) center eroded,” he concludes,” The truths and trust shared by those in the center eroded, too. When government stopped working for people in that center, they drifted off to the fringes, lured by the fringe information they were barraged with online. Like many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol or people who refused a safe vaccine, they became vulnerable to the false promises promoted by the demagogues, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists that the algorithms were steering them to.”

Brill listed the ways that government can step in to make the internet a safer and calmer place. But given the way our politics is unfolding as we embark on a divisive national election, Brill’s prescription – sadly – seems like a long shot.   

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.