Jacob Siegel misleads readers in his new book. When I asked for corrections, he cried censorship in The Free Press—writing as accuser, investigator, and fact-checker all in one. A lie-machine exposé.
Personally not on your side politically, but after reading both sides of this particular issue I cannot deny you have utterly obliterated Mr. Siegel here.
The scary thing is that slander and innuendo appeal successfully to our baser instinct whereas the well-balanced assessment here requires thinking and some navigational competence in following a nuanced argument.
I am afraid the calory-rich, fact-poor McDonaldization of the public discourse is hard to roll back. I am glad Mrs. DiResta is at least trying.
I think some of your efforts around moderation and the like were less than laudatory. However, you are clearly in the right on this. Siegel is a partisan liar who has clearly been exposed. The bigger issue is with The Free Press and Henry Holt who should have done this fact checking instead of relying on a partisan liar like Seigel.
Great explanation. They’ve created this whole faux universe that has made it so difficult to have real conversations about moderation, censorship, and misinformation. But I guess that’s what we should expect from those pushing a faux reality. Keep up the good work!
A Sisyphean task, this. I can’t imagine how discouraging it is to attempt to push this rock back uphill when Siegel and others continuously work to dislodge it from your grasp, sending it rolling backwards again.
Calling BS on actual BS is violence! Lol, or so Siegel would like the world to believe.
Also, it continues to astound me how so many people completely misunderstand what censorship actually is, how it works, and, most importantly, what isn’t censorship!
She is lied about at a scale that's on the verge of straight up libel, in the service of a malignant strain of know-nothingism Siegel needs to propel book sales.
And you're put off by her use of "bullshit"?
Frankly, I'm astounded that she keeps fighting these massive "big lies" with such equanimity.
And I was writing IN SUPPORT of her here. I'm just saying that it's even more important to look like the sane one when you are accusing others of insanity or being "on the verge of straight up libel," as you have interpreted this.
Seeing the mails in question, I think Siegel had better address this, and do so honestly.
Speaking from experience here, this is just not a helpful message.
You may believe it's a helpful message. But that's not the effect.
Think of it this way: You're basically telling someone:
"You've been viciously lied about. But don't express anger. No, no, you should not do that. it will hurt you. No matter how much the libel, no matter how much pain it causes you, DON'T BE IMPOLITE!!!"
I haven't read his book yet, but didn't take your classification of 21,897,364 tweets as associated with "election integrity incidents" to mean they were censored by the platforms, either in the reviews I've read of it or in previous reporting on this matter.
I've read much of the EIP report, and my understanding is that it stands by its conclusion in the Executive Summary:
"Academia, platforms, civil society, and all levels of government must be committed, in their own ways, to truth in the service of a free and open society. All stakeholders must focus on predicting and pre-bunking false narratives, detecting mis-and disinformation as it occurs, and countering it whenever appropriate."
As EIP believes:
"Doing nothing is not an option. A government by and for the people depends on the people coming together around trustworthy information in order to make informed decisions—including around electing leaders."
I also read it express concerns about the lack of "moderation" in comparatively unmoderated platforms like Gab and Parler.
Based upon the report, I've concluded that EIP advocated for platforms to inject themselves into the conversations between social media users about topics such as "stop the steal" (ranked 2nd in the top 10 "incidents") to in some way sanction or inhibit tweets of that nature.
Am I incorrect my understanding of the report, that EIP advocated for realtime classification and moderation (i.e. censorship) of incidents like that (to include sanctioning, reducing visibility, etc)?
The 22 million tweets were classified after the election. Moderation on a private platform includes labeling. Moderation isn't censorship -- it's a private platform exercising its 1A rights. People seem to find that hard to grasp. Labeling is overwhelmingly what platforms did with "stolen election" bullshit - and labeling is counterspeech.
I went back and looked at the report mentions of Gab and Parler and they're pretty neutral descriptors of what occurred on those platforms in those chronologies. It points out that groups that had been actioned for incitement decamped there, in some cases. It mentions that foreign trolls weren't actioned there. It’s not calling for their destruction or advocating they lose their hosting or even especially concerned. So perhaps your conclusions have been shaped by your pre-existing opinions. I've said plenty of times that not all platforms have to have the same moderation policies; I think it's great that Rumble has its "no Antifa" policy. Variety is the spice of life. People should go to the private platforms in line with their values. It's too bad the so-called free speech absolutists on the right (they are not) don't recognize the 1A rights of the companies to set their terms as they see fit.
eipartnership.net/report describes what kinds of things did actually get taken down: "In our dataset of tickets, incitement to violence had the highest rate of content or account removal. Despite what appeared to be clear policy to penalize or remove repeat spreaders and high-profile disinformation actors, platforms appeared to shy away from using this particular intervention."
I'm not sure why you are jumping to "It’s not calling for their destruction or advocating they lose their hosting or even especially concerned."
I didn't say that you wanted to do that, and am not sure why you interpreted it that way.
In "Cross-Platform Complexities", the EIP report said "Another challenge is that some platforms, such as Parler and Gab, do not have content moderation policies or even intentions to moderate."
The report refers to it as a "challenge", as it noted "the cross-platform spread of misinformation cannot be solved through intervention by one platform alone".
Which means the EIP considers social media conversations to be a problem that are unmoderated/uncensored for veracity within the context of elections, no?
So, to ask my question again, which you didn't expressly answer --and with "labeling" interjected:
==============
Am I incorrect my understanding of the report, that EIP advocated for realtime classification and moderation (i.e. censorship) of incidents like that (to include sanctioning, labeling, reducing visibility, etc)?
==============
A side note: this is one problem with centralized "fact checking" -- you and I are encountering definitional and inference issues here simply within a polite conversation.
If I ever saw an automated "fact check" interjected into the middle of a conversation I was having that says "Moderation is not censorship", I think it would be fundamentally counterproductive.
I'd consider "labeling" a sanction, as well as a publisher's counter speech. But if you like, add "labeling" to both my paragraphs above. I didn't intend you to construe it as leaving it out -- I am well aware that labeling was a common measure taken.
Regarding "censorship" -- let's not wordthink here.
You operate under an extremely limited perspective on what censorship is.
To quote Britannica:
"censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law."
For you to say "moderation isn't censorship" is doesn't hold up across all common definitions of the word. As the Britannica definition notes, censorship "occurs in all manifestations of authority".
For example, if I have a private high school with a school library and I have a rule that no books written by communists be shelved, I'd consider that censorship. You'd take a limited view, restrict censorship to governmental authority only, and consider it moderation.
But I am not wrong, as you implied.
You jumped to conflate censorship with the 1A and governmental authority, which I didn't introduce at all. Although the EIP included "all levels of government" in the stakeholders within that Executive Summary conclusion, I wasn't claiming infringement by them.
I didn’t jump to conflate it. Although you may not have mentioned because you want to stick to your frame, legally this is unambiguously how US courts treat the question. Moderation is the platform exercising editorial curation — you can say Rumble “censors” antifa if you want to, because they have “authority” over their platform. But If they decided they wanted to ban anyone from using the word “cat” they could, and that would be them exercising their 1A rights too.
Alex Jones of Infowars has a ToS too listing what you can’t post in his community: “If you violate these rules, your posts and/or user name will be deleted. Remember: you are a guest here. It is not censorship if you violate the rules and your post is deleted. All civilizations have rules and if you violate them you can expect to be ostracized from the tribe.”
The user has no speech rights on a private platform beyond what the platform gives them. Ive written about this and debated the point over on my main substack while arguing for decentralization and community moderation…and in tons of other places so you can read whats out there. :)
When you’re on a platform and they label your post — that’s not tyrannical. You may not like it but they’ve laid out the global rules - “we consider election denialism harmful and here is how we address it” - and you’ve chosen to nonetheless participate. there are plenty of places where election deniers can speak without getting labeled. Or they can just cope with the label, because the 2020 election wasn’t stolen.
Libraries and newspapers also curate. The Free Press is going to run a letter to the editor from me — but that was their discretion.
When the *government* says “no communist books” in a public library thats when things get questionable.
EIP wasn’t just me, tbc, and when Siegel says I “lead” It he’s lying. The report has a range of perspectives woven into a group output, but when it talks about low/no moderation platforms it’s to make the point that even if a big platform somehow did stifle every instance of some rumor things just roll over to the other platforms anyway. This is the internet.
So you can use the expansive word “censorship” to frame your argument but most people who use that word expansively (like Elon) do it because it has a moral connotation where the the entity then has to defend themselves against some accusation. It’s a frame of tyranny because that’s how it’s been used in the past — by oppressive governments.
I wrote about this for Law & Liberty. Since it’s the weekend I plan to hang out with my kids and not rehash it in the comment section.
Since you mentioned EIP’s government partners: anyone could send tips that our analysts could look at. State and local governments did, and we declared that; all of those tickets have come out under subpoena and there are no demands that we tell any platform to do anything. We didn’t find plenty of tips serious issues or in scope and that’s in the report. When they sent things that were a big deal we analyzed in realtime blog posts.
As we very transparently declare in the report, State Dept GEC sent some wondering if they were Russian accounts. We ignored many of these because we decided there wasn’t evidence that they were. There was no laundering of any federal government demand to a platform.
The best evidence of this is something else Siegel simply glosses over but that Jim Jordan shows in his report: CISA had its own direct email contact with the platforms! It didn’t need us. It didn’t send us any tips. We forwarded nothing on their behalf. Even Jordan couldn’t find evidence that we had. He was reduced to complaining that the GEC talked to us — reduced to innuendo. Any theory of state control or cEnsoRshIp lAunDerIng has collapsed.
The question you should be asking is why people like Mike Benz and the other election deniers who lied about or work — or Siegel, who uses him as a source despite knowing he’s unreliable, and who spun this as the worlds largest censorship project with me as its singular leader lol — were so afraid of our project that they mounted a multi-year smear campaign to attack OUR 1A protected research.
Fascinating. I hope TFP gives you the opportunity to present your side. I agree with the commenter above the expletives are working against you. Also I think you have a typo here “A couple of pages before the number appears, Siegel spends a some time on a character sketch establishing me as dishonest.” Am I reading this right that Siegel emailed you with questions and gave you 2 hours to respond? If that is true, it’s disappointing behavior.
Because it’s a factcheck and also because this is the key sentence. Why is the continued burden of proof on me and not on the person making the utterly baseless accusation?
Personally not on your side politically, but after reading both sides of this particular issue I cannot deny you have utterly obliterated Mr. Siegel here.
I’m an independent, you never know. :) thanks for keeping an open mind.
The scary thing is that slander and innuendo appeal successfully to our baser instinct whereas the well-balanced assessment here requires thinking and some navigational competence in following a nuanced argument.
I am afraid the calory-rich, fact-poor McDonaldization of the public discourse is hard to roll back. I am glad Mrs. DiResta is at least trying.
I think some of your efforts around moderation and the like were less than laudatory. However, you are clearly in the right on this. Siegel is a partisan liar who has clearly been exposed. The bigger issue is with The Free Press and Henry Holt who should have done this fact checking instead of relying on a partisan liar like Seigel.
Great explanation. They’ve created this whole faux universe that has made it so difficult to have real conversations about moderation, censorship, and misinformation. But I guess that’s what we should expect from those pushing a faux reality. Keep up the good work!
A Sisyphean task, this. I can’t imagine how discouraging it is to attempt to push this rock back uphill when Siegel and others continuously work to dislodge it from your grasp, sending it rolling backwards again.
Kudos to you for your determined persistence.
Calling BS on actual BS is violence! Lol, or so Siegel would like the world to believe.
Also, it continues to astound me how so many people completely misunderstand what censorship actually is, how it works, and, most importantly, what isn’t censorship!
I wish you had not cursed in this; it weakens your case somehow.
But I really do appreciate the additional context. I think Siegel has some 'splaining to do...
She is lied about at a scale that's on the verge of straight up libel, in the service of a malignant strain of know-nothingism Siegel needs to propel book sales.
And you're put off by her use of "bullshit"?
Frankly, I'm astounded that she keeps fighting these massive "big lies" with such equanimity.
I was referring more to this:
"This is ... crazy bitch shit"
And I was writing IN SUPPORT of her here. I'm just saying that it's even more important to look like the sane one when you are accusing others of insanity or being "on the verge of straight up libel," as you have interpreted this.
Seeing the mails in question, I think Siegel had better address this, and do so honestly.
it is crazy bitch shit though.
Speaking from experience here, this is just not a helpful message.
You may believe it's a helpful message. But that's not the effect.
Think of it this way: You're basically telling someone:
"You've been viciously lied about. But don't express anger. No, no, you should not do that. it will hurt you. No matter how much the libel, no matter how much pain it causes you, DON'T BE IMPOLITE!!!"
Do you see the problem?
I haven't read his book yet, but didn't take your classification of 21,897,364 tweets as associated with "election integrity incidents" to mean they were censored by the platforms, either in the reviews I've read of it or in previous reporting on this matter.
I've read much of the EIP report, and my understanding is that it stands by its conclusion in the Executive Summary:
"Academia, platforms, civil society, and all levels of government must be committed, in their own ways, to truth in the service of a free and open society. All stakeholders must focus on predicting and pre-bunking false narratives, detecting mis-and disinformation as it occurs, and countering it whenever appropriate."
As EIP believes:
"Doing nothing is not an option. A government by and for the people depends on the people coming together around trustworthy information in order to make informed decisions—including around electing leaders."
I also read it express concerns about the lack of "moderation" in comparatively unmoderated platforms like Gab and Parler.
Based upon the report, I've concluded that EIP advocated for platforms to inject themselves into the conversations between social media users about topics such as "stop the steal" (ranked 2nd in the top 10 "incidents") to in some way sanction or inhibit tweets of that nature.
Am I incorrect my understanding of the report, that EIP advocated for realtime classification and moderation (i.e. censorship) of incidents like that (to include sanctioning, reducing visibility, etc)?
The 22 million tweets were classified after the election. Moderation on a private platform includes labeling. Moderation isn't censorship -- it's a private platform exercising its 1A rights. People seem to find that hard to grasp. Labeling is overwhelmingly what platforms did with "stolen election" bullshit - and labeling is counterspeech.
I went back and looked at the report mentions of Gab and Parler and they're pretty neutral descriptors of what occurred on those platforms in those chronologies. It points out that groups that had been actioned for incitement decamped there, in some cases. It mentions that foreign trolls weren't actioned there. It’s not calling for their destruction or advocating they lose their hosting or even especially concerned. So perhaps your conclusions have been shaped by your pre-existing opinions. I've said plenty of times that not all platforms have to have the same moderation policies; I think it's great that Rumble has its "no Antifa" policy. Variety is the spice of life. People should go to the private platforms in line with their values. It's too bad the so-called free speech absolutists on the right (they are not) don't recognize the 1A rights of the companies to set their terms as they see fit.
eipartnership.net/report describes what kinds of things did actually get taken down: "In our dataset of tickets, incitement to violence had the highest rate of content or account removal. Despite what appeared to be clear policy to penalize or remove repeat spreaders and high-profile disinformation actors, platforms appeared to shy away from using this particular intervention."
I'm not sure why you are jumping to "It’s not calling for their destruction or advocating they lose their hosting or even especially concerned."
I didn't say that you wanted to do that, and am not sure why you interpreted it that way.
In "Cross-Platform Complexities", the EIP report said "Another challenge is that some platforms, such as Parler and Gab, do not have content moderation policies or even intentions to moderate."
The report refers to it as a "challenge", as it noted "the cross-platform spread of misinformation cannot be solved through intervention by one platform alone".
Which means the EIP considers social media conversations to be a problem that are unmoderated/uncensored for veracity within the context of elections, no?
So, to ask my question again, which you didn't expressly answer --and with "labeling" interjected:
==============
Am I incorrect my understanding of the report, that EIP advocated for realtime classification and moderation (i.e. censorship) of incidents like that (to include sanctioning, labeling, reducing visibility, etc)?
==============
A side note: this is one problem with centralized "fact checking" -- you and I are encountering definitional and inference issues here simply within a polite conversation.
If I ever saw an automated "fact check" interjected into the middle of a conversation I was having that says "Moderation is not censorship", I think it would be fundamentally counterproductive.
I'd consider "labeling" a sanction, as well as a publisher's counter speech. But if you like, add "labeling" to both my paragraphs above. I didn't intend you to construe it as leaving it out -- I am well aware that labeling was a common measure taken.
Regarding "censorship" -- let's not wordthink here.
You operate under an extremely limited perspective on what censorship is.
To quote Britannica:
"censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law."
https://www.britannica.com/topic/censorship
For you to say "moderation isn't censorship" is doesn't hold up across all common definitions of the word. As the Britannica definition notes, censorship "occurs in all manifestations of authority".
For example, if I have a private high school with a school library and I have a rule that no books written by communists be shelved, I'd consider that censorship. You'd take a limited view, restrict censorship to governmental authority only, and consider it moderation.
But I am not wrong, as you implied.
You jumped to conflate censorship with the 1A and governmental authority, which I didn't introduce at all. Although the EIP included "all levels of government" in the stakeholders within that Executive Summary conclusion, I wasn't claiming infringement by them.
I didn’t jump to conflate it. Although you may not have mentioned because you want to stick to your frame, legally this is unambiguously how US courts treat the question. Moderation is the platform exercising editorial curation — you can say Rumble “censors” antifa if you want to, because they have “authority” over their platform. But If they decided they wanted to ban anyone from using the word “cat” they could, and that would be them exercising their 1A rights too.
Alex Jones of Infowars has a ToS too listing what you can’t post in his community: “If you violate these rules, your posts and/or user name will be deleted. Remember: you are a guest here. It is not censorship if you violate the rules and your post is deleted. All civilizations have rules and if you violate them you can expect to be ostracized from the tribe.”
The user has no speech rights on a private platform beyond what the platform gives them. Ive written about this and debated the point over on my main substack while arguing for decentralization and community moderation…and in tons of other places so you can read whats out there. :)
When you’re on a platform and they label your post — that’s not tyrannical. You may not like it but they’ve laid out the global rules - “we consider election denialism harmful and here is how we address it” - and you’ve chosen to nonetheless participate. there are plenty of places where election deniers can speak without getting labeled. Or they can just cope with the label, because the 2020 election wasn’t stolen.
Libraries and newspapers also curate. The Free Press is going to run a letter to the editor from me — but that was their discretion.
When the *government* says “no communist books” in a public library thats when things get questionable.
EIP wasn’t just me, tbc, and when Siegel says I “lead” It he’s lying. The report has a range of perspectives woven into a group output, but when it talks about low/no moderation platforms it’s to make the point that even if a big platform somehow did stifle every instance of some rumor things just roll over to the other platforms anyway. This is the internet.
So you can use the expansive word “censorship” to frame your argument but most people who use that word expansively (like Elon) do it because it has a moral connotation where the the entity then has to defend themselves against some accusation. It’s a frame of tyranny because that’s how it’s been used in the past — by oppressive governments.
I wrote about this for Law & Liberty. Since it’s the weekend I plan to hang out with my kids and not rehash it in the comment section.
Since you mentioned EIP’s government partners: anyone could send tips that our analysts could look at. State and local governments did, and we declared that; all of those tickets have come out under subpoena and there are no demands that we tell any platform to do anything. We didn’t find plenty of tips serious issues or in scope and that’s in the report. When they sent things that were a big deal we analyzed in realtime blog posts.
As we very transparently declare in the report, State Dept GEC sent some wondering if they were Russian accounts. We ignored many of these because we decided there wasn’t evidence that they were. There was no laundering of any federal government demand to a platform.
The best evidence of this is something else Siegel simply glosses over but that Jim Jordan shows in his report: CISA had its own direct email contact with the platforms! It didn’t need us. It didn’t send us any tips. We forwarded nothing on their behalf. Even Jordan couldn’t find evidence that we had. He was reduced to complaining that the GEC talked to us — reduced to innuendo. Any theory of state control or cEnsoRshIp lAunDerIng has collapsed.
The question you should be asking is why people like Mike Benz and the other election deniers who lied about or work — or Siegel, who uses him as a source despite knowing he’s unreliable, and who spun this as the worlds largest censorship project with me as its singular leader lol — were so afraid of our project that they mounted a multi-year smear campaign to attack OUR 1A protected research.
Speaking of censorship, this is one of my favorite film scenes pertaining to censorship (from Cinema Paradiso).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr3TcE009HY
Wow. I hope they publish your response in TFP. That is quite egregious.
Fascinating. I hope TFP gives you the opportunity to present your side. I agree with the commenter above the expletives are working against you. Also I think you have a typo here “A couple of pages before the number appears, Siegel spends a some time on a character sketch establishing me as dishonest.” Am I reading this right that Siegel emailed you with questions and gave you 2 hours to respond? If that is true, it’s disappointing behavior.
Because it’s a factcheck and also because this is the key sentence. Why is the continued burden of proof on me and not on the person making the utterly baseless accusation?
Why didn’t you answer my question?