The information environment

I shoulda assembled a linkpile of resources long ago. For now, just one key one:

Nothing moves the needle

A reflection on how mainstream news media have been compromised … and why even when they do report what is happening it does not shape our poltics as it once did. Its reflection on Russian disinformation is particularly good, neither under- nor over-stating its relevance:

⋯ Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a troll farm in St. Petersburg— didn’t invent a new method. It merely industrialized Surkov’s domestic playbook and aimed it at a country with no immune system for it—the United States. The clearest illustration isn’t abstract: the IRA organized both a pro-Trump rally and a counter-protest, at the same place and time, in Houston in May 2016 — manufacturing both sides of a street confrontation among real Americans who had no idea the same operation was staging them against each other. That is Surkov’s method, exported and automated.

None of this is speculative. The Mueller Report and Volume 5 of Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2020 findings — written under Marco Rubio as the committee’s acting chairman — documented real coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. That’s not a theory. That’s the official record. What’s happened since is the payoff: a Republican Party that has largely stopped treating Kremlin-aligned talking points as disqualifying, and a pipeline — tracked in detail by researchers like Renee DiResta at Stanford — that launders Russian-state narratives into American conservative media until nobody can quite trace where a given talking point originated. It doesn’t matter anymore whether it started in Moscow. It’s ours now. There’s an old Soviet intelligence term for what Surkov practiced: reflexive control — shaping what an adversary believes to be true so thoroughly that the adversary defeats itself, freely, without ever feeling coerced.

The ascent of social media made Surkov’s method exponentially more effective. It led to the creation of thousands of siloed news platforms governed by algorithms which grew increasingly impenetrable. Before long, Russia and its American assets—knowingly or otherwise— began promoting so many conflicting and contradictory narratives that it was impossible for a single shared narrative to dominate the whole culture.

So that’s what I mean when I say freedom of the press doesn’t work anymore—at least, not the way we always assumed it did. It isn’t that the First Amendment stopped protecting reporters, or that fewer scoops are landing. It’s that Surkov’s method, and its automated heirs, did the one thing capable of neutralizing the whole system: they got to the audience before factual reality did.