UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Twitter's Attempt to Suppress Grayzone Reporting Backfires as Warning Label
Becomes Meme
"The new Twitter scare label illustrates the threat our kind of factual
reporting presents to a national security state that must employ social
media censorship to conceal its agenda from the public." - The Grayzone's
Max Blumenthal
Mint Press
by Alan Macleod
February 24th, 2021
By Alan Macleod
SAN FRANSICO - "These materials may have been attained through hacking."
That is the warning message that any Twitter users coming across a recent
Grayzone investigative report are met with, replete with a large exclamation
point (!) signaling danger.
The report, penned by Grayzone's editor Max Blumenthal, exposes how
influential media outlets like Reuters, the BBC and Bellingcat have been
secretly working hand in hand with the British government's Foreign and
Commonwealth Office (FCO) to promote regime change inside Russia and lead a
campaign of demonization against it internationally.
However, Twitter, which itself was exposed as having intimate ties to the UK
military and secret services, attempted to suppress the report's spread.
Those attempting to retweet posts containing a link to the Grayzone article
were met with another alert about sharing hacked information. Many users
also claimed that interacting with the post caused their Twitter apps to
crash.
Blumenthal saw the decision as an attempt to stifle unwelcome revelations,
telling MintPress this morning:
By applying a scare label exclusively to my article, Twitter has contributed
nothing to the public's understanding of news or disinformation. Instead, it
has confirmed the veracity of my reporting, which shows some of the most
powerful and esteemed news organizations acting as UK Foreign Office-funded
information warfare weapons. Further, the Twitter scare label illustrates
the threat this kind of factual reporting presents to a national security
state that must employ social media censorship to conceal its agenda from
the public."
Double standards
The Grayzone maintains that the documents it used were leaked, not hacked.
Yet the line between the two is not always clear. Anonymous leaks are the
lifeblood of journalism. But without a name to go with a document, it is
virtually impossible to prove good intentions on the part of the leaker.
Governments and other powerful entities or individuals can consequently
claim that any information portraying them in a bad light was hacked,
shutting down any discussion or reporting of it online. This has already
happened with YouTube, which announced in August that it would remove all
content containing hacked information.
Twitter did not extend the same warning label to The Intercept's recent
article on the Chinese police force's treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang
province, nor to The New York Times's report on Texas Senator Ted Cruz's
trip to Cancun amid a winter blackout in his home state. Both of these
stories were based on confidential information that was either leaked or
hacked. According to Twitter, the Grayzone report was the first time they
used their powers to slap on the label.
"Twitter is ad hoc inventing new soft-censorship tools as leaked information
reveals clandestine military intelligence disinformation networks operating
across a variety of mainstream news outlets," journalist Dan Cohen, who has
published with the Grayzone (as has the author of this article), told
MintPress. Others, such as the host of the "Chapo Trap House" podcast, Will
Menaker, joked that the warning sign was actually a new feature that alerted
users to "journalism that is especially important." Meanwhile, Ian Goodrum,
a journalist from China Daily, shared a doctored image of the warning
message that read "These materials make the US State Department mad."
Unintended consequences
What Twitter did not expect to happen was for its massive user base to turn
the warning label into a meme, sharing pictures and joke information along
with a link to the Grayzone report, ensuring that the phrase "These
materials may have been attained through hacking" was prominently displayed
on the tweet. At the time of writing, a new tweet featuring a link to the
article was being sent around once every 25 seconds, turning the situation
into the latest example of the Streisand Effect - a phenomenon whereby
attempts to remove, suppress or censor information has the unintended effect
of further publicizing it.
"It was thanks to the creativity and utterly hilarious intervention of
thousands of Twitter users, who discovered that the scare label was prime
meme material, that the censorship could not be swept under the rug. Now
Bellingcat is trending, and not for the reasons its UK FCO-backed directors
would like it to be," Blumenthal told us.
A familiar pattern
The Grayzone has long been on the receiving end of strongarm tactics from
internet giants. Like MintPress, it was fully censored from Wikipedia last
year, meaning that it is no longer allowed to be used as a source. It has
also felt the wrath of Google's algorithmic changes, meaning that it will
rarely appear as the top result for many searches, throttling traffic to the
site.
Twitter also announced yesterday that it was deleting hundreds of accounts
linked to Russia. Among the primary reasons it gave for the decision was
that these users were "undermining faith in the NATO alliance." It appears
that, as big tech and big government become increasingly indistinguishable,
there will be a diminishing ability to expose or challenge the actions of
Western nation-states online.