How Trump, Putin and the GOP plan to rig the 2024 election

President Biden and a large swath of the federal government have been legally barred — under threat of federal prison — from communicating with Twitter, Facebook, and other social media about lies and misinformation that “conservatives” may have posted on those sites.

At first blush, it seems like just another crackpot decision by a crackpot QAno-style Trump-appointed judge who, in 2021, was the guy who cited multiple naked lies and myths about Covid vaccines to block mandatory vaccination of healthcare workers.

After all, Louisiana District Judge Terry Doughty had gone so far as to falsely claim, in that and two other 2021 cases, that vaccines “do not prevent transmission of the disease,” and that, “the virus has achieved an immune escape from COVID-19 vaccines.”

He even agreed with attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci for saying that Hydroxychloroquine didn’t cure Covid, and cited Fauci’s assertions that the drug didn’t work in one of his legal opinions as evidence that the Biden administration was lying to the American people.

But this may also be the opening salvo in the disinformation wars that are most likely soon to be a big part of the 2024 presidential election.

Judge Doughty ruled — on the Fourth of July, by way of showing his patriotism — that when the Biden administration reached out to identify or highlight lies that social media sites may choose to take down or at least flag because they could be destructive to the public health or democracy itself, they were actually engaging in a broad “censorship” worthy of a George Orwell novel.

The Republican positions and lies posted on social media that Judge Doughty claims were censored included, he wrote in his ruling:

“[O]pposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power.”

Outraged and indignant, Doughty fumed that:

“All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech.”

And when I mentioned Orwell, I wasn’t reaching for an extreme metaphor to describe a federal judge with a lifetime appointment and clear connections to the GOP who’s gone off the deep end. In his summary enjoining the Biden administration from communicating with social media companies he lays it out in language worthy of a John Birch Society tract:

“[T]he evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. … [T]he United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

So this isn’t just about Covid (although Covid mythologies, falsehoods, and rewrites of history play a large role in his 155 page ruling). The judge specifically ruled that a long list of federal officials, from President Biden on down to the FBI, other federal intelligence agencies, and the CDC:

“ARE HEREBY ENJOINED AND RESTRAINED from taking the following actions as to social-media companies:
“(1) meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms
“(2) specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
“(3) urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech,
“(4) emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
“(5) collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content posted with social-media companies containing protected free speech;
“(6) threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech; ...
“(7) taking any action such as urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution;
“(8) following up with social-media companies to determine whether the social-media companies removed, deleted, suppressed, or reduced previous social-media postings containing protected free speech ;
“(9) requesting content reports from social-media companies detailing actions taken to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce content containing protected free speech; and
“(10 notifying social-media companies to Be on The Lookout (BOLO) for postings containing protected free speech.”

At no time, in any circumstances under either Trump or Biden, had any social media companies been ordered by our government to remove political or public health content or threatened with consequences if they failed to do so.

There was literally no “censorship” by the federal government, and there is no ongoing attempt to establish anything like it.

Most of Doughty’s arguments reach back to the days of Covid (much of it under Trump), when the CDC was desperately trying to get the help of social media companies to at least flag or otherwise get control over a flood of lies about Covid — many promoted by the Russian government and the GOP — that literally led to the unnecessary deaths of at least a half-million Americans.

In April of last year, the Biden administration announced the creation of what they called a “Disinformation Governance Board” to, as CNN noted, “coordinate department activities related to disinformation aimed at the US population and infrastructure.”

The board has no authority or police powers; it’s merely advisory. Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress the board was primarily designed to flag “Russian cyber and election misinformation.” As he testified during the last week of April, 2022:

“We have just established a mis- and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security to more effectively combat this threat, not only to election security but to our homeland security.”

But Republican politicians, who regularly rely on lies about “open borders,” phony crime statistics, false depictions of the state of the economy, claims of “stolen elections,” fantasies about the danger of vaccines and efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, and wild claims of the “danger of trans people” and the “safety of guns,” went nuts.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-FistBump&Run), tweeted:

“Rather than police our border, Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority.”

Reporting on Hawley and other Republican hysteria, The New York Times dryly wrote:

“It’s also worth noting that the Trump administration’s DHS undertook similar efforts; in 2018 it created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which dealt extensively with the spread of misinformation online — including both foreign interference in elections and the domestic spread of coronavirus misinformation.”

So, nothing here, right? But, no.

Hawley, Jordan, Judge Doughty, and other Republicans who have gone berserk about the Biden administration’s efforts to flag online dis- and mal-information seem to be trying to block in advance any efforts by a Democratic administration to flag viral lies. But why?

They know their history.

Social media — particularly Facebook — was the key to putting Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and both Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin knew it because they helped make it happen.

So too, now, do Republicans broadly know it. And it appears they’re just fine with it, so long as the lies help Republicans and hurt Democrats.

Putin’s former employee Paul Manafort was running Trump’s 2016 campaign at the time the Mueller Report documented numerous contacts between that campaign and Russian agents. Dozens were indicted. Manafort was pardoned by Trump.

Manafort was passing along internal campaign information to Russian intelligence agents via a connected oligarch who’d previously paid him tens of millions of dollars to successfully install Putin’s puppet Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine.

That campaign information from Manafort allowed Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency’s (I.R.A.) trolls and bots operating out of St. Petersburg to micro-target individual American voters, apparently mostly on Facebook, but broadly across all social media, with messages designed to discourage them from voting. (Yeah, that Prigozhin: the one running the private army in Ukraine.)

Mueller’s report and multiple journalistic investigations have noted that the most common message out of Russia then was directed at Black Americans and was, essentially, “both parties are the same so it’s a waste of time to vote.”

A report from Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge, working with researchers at Columbia University, concluded, as reported by The New York Times:

“‘The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,’ the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.

“The report says that while ‘other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively by dozens.’ In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.

“The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us.”

And it appears to have worked in suppressing the Black vote in swing states.

A 2018 bipartisan Senate report found the Russian efforts consequential, as the BBC headline on that analysis summarizes:

“Russian trolls’ chief target was ‘black US voters’ in 2016.”

The news story summarizes:

“A Senate inquiry has concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group... more than African-Americans.’ …
“Thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and You Tube accounts created by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) were aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s campaign and supporting Donald Trump, the committee concludes.
“More than 66% of Facebook adverts posted by the Russian troll farm contained a term related to race.
“African-American community voters were discouraged from voting, and from supporting Hillary Clinton.”

Between the information compiled by Cambridge Analytica and the details passed along from the GOP to Prigozhin via Manafort, a mere margin of 43,000 votes across a handful of swing states —all micro-targeted by Russia — handed the electoral college to Trump, even though he lost the nationwide vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots.

Now, it appears, Trump, Putin, and the GOP are going to try it again, this time with the help of a Trump-appointed federal judge who was the perfect patsy because he’d previously drunk the Qanon and GOP Kool-Aid on Covid, masks, horse de-wormer, and vaccines.

Will history repeat itself?

Will Judge Doughty succeed in preventing our intelligence agencies from even informing social media companies about massive viral lies, supported by Putin and amplified by click- and outrage-driven social media algorithms? If so, will that throw the election to the GOP?

Has this case just revealed the core kernel of the Republican Party’s main 2024 electoral strategy — to reinvent “truth” across multiple social media platforms and pound on it so hard that it becomes reality — with no possibility that the federal agencies with the legitimacy and expertise to debunk them can even speak out?

Are we about to see another massive campaign of highly targeted lies — amplified by foreign, malicious actors — designed to put Donald Trump back in the White House and Republicans in charge of Congress?

Will they again target Black Americans, or will this campaign be broader and even more insidious? Are we seeing its early foundation laid with GOP hate campaigns directed at the LGBTQ+ community?

Is Judge Doughty helping them set it up a year in advance?

As they used to say on TV, “Watch this space.”