Do you have a source on any instance where Wikileaks spread "disinfo"?
Wikileaks likely did spread information which was provided by and served the interests of Russia, but I've never seen a credible argument that false information was published.
The whole Seth Rich debacle is the most obvious example in which they strongly implied that he was the source of leaked DNC docs. We later found out that Wikileaks was still in contact with the source after Seth Rich was already dead.
There are plenty of source links in the Wikipedia article[1].
Ah, that's fair. Wikileaks' twitter account played much faster and looser than what they published on their website.
I'm curious if we'll ever get an accounting of the internal organizational power struggles that occurred during the 2016 election. It felt like Assange and his proxies were seeking vengeance through Twitter (to be fair, its claimed Hillary Clinton joked "Can't we just drone this guy" about Assange - no lack of bad blood between them), but that somehow never seemed to bleed onto the Wikileaks website itself.
While you might not know who your source was, if you're in contact with them after the proposed contact point's death you clearly are aware it is not that person. They played coy when they knew overtly he was not the contact point.
There is a difference between "playing coy" and defaming a dead person by implying they committed a crime. Denying Seth Rich as the source wouldn't have revealed the actual source.
Plus it was more than "playing coy". For example, they promised a reward for people who came forward with info on Rich's death. Why do that if they had no relation to him?
>Again, I really did miss the part where saying "we don't reveal who our sources are" is the same thing as calling a dead man a criminal.
Who said they are the same thing? I repeatedly used "implied". You are framing it as if they were asked a direct question about Seth Rich and their only response was "no comment." They said stuff like this[1]:
>“Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There is a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, who was shot in the back. Murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington,” said Julian Assange appearing on a Dutch television program called Nieuwsuur.
>Assange added, “We have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States and that our sources are, you know, our sources face serious risks that is why they come to us so we can protect their anonymity.”
He is directly implying that Rich was killed for political reasons, that he was a whisleblower, and then in the next sentence he says "our sources". Do you not see the implication in talking like that?
>To try and uncover suspected corruption and leak it if there was more to his murder than met the eye. It was reasonable to suspect something was up.
The problem, like elsewhere with Wikileaks, is the selective search to uncover corruption. I would have no complaint if Wikileaks made it standard to always offer a reward for information on the death of any political staffer. The problem is that they only offered the reward for this specific staffer already knowing that there was a conspiracy theory that he was their source. That gives them plausible deniability that they are "just seeking truth" while also reinforcing the perceived connection between Seth Rich and Wikileaks.
Oh, I'm sorry did you get upset because somebody inferred something different from what you said to what you actually meant?
That must be upsetting.
Nonetheless in spite of what you said I think maybe you were implying something different?
>He is directly implying
that Rich was killed for political reasons, that he was a whisleblower, and then in the next sentence he says "our sources". Do you not see the implication in talking like that?
No, I categorically do not.
He was trying to illustrate the risks of revealing sources (i.e. people could get murdered) and he suspected something fishy was going on with the murder of Rich. As did a lot of people because it WAS fishy.
Once again, you KEEP ignoring that he said "WE DO NOT SHARE WHO OUR SOURCES ARE". You are deliberately ignoring that he stated that very clearly in favor of an incorrect reading between the lines.
>The problem, like elsewhere with Wikileaks, is the selective search to uncover corruption.
I honestly can't fathom the idea that uncovering corruption is just only if you manage to do it to every party equally.
The idea that truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate was reprehensible if it affected the outcome of the election was never actually justified, it was simply assumed.
Those two are not contradictory because the first one is based off the substance of the documents and the second one is based off the perception of the documents. Nothing too substantial was revealed but the existence of the emails was enough to feed into the existing narrative that Clinton couldn't be trusted and it therefore harmed her chances of winning.
>The idea that truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate was reprehensible if it affected the outcome of the election was never actually justified, it was simply assumed.
Because partial truthfulness isn't that different than lying. Imagine two scenarios:
1. Clinton gets the debate questions ahead of time.
2. Both candidates get the debate questions ahead of time. (Just a hypothetical and not a real accusation)
Story 1 would lead you to believe the Clinton is corrupt and will abuse the system for her advantage. Those two traits were already two of the biggest criticisms of her.
Story 2 would lead you to believe that it is the debate system that is corrupt and no specific candidate was at fault.
Story 2 being true automatically means story 1 is also true. However if you knew that story 2 was true and reported it as story 1, are you still "truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate"? You are reporting facts but in such a way as to bias the story. I think that is certainly reprehensible from a journalistic standpoint.
Many journalists believed that almost everything in the substance of these docs would be true for other candidates, they just didn't have the documents from other candidates as proof.
There was the email, if I remember, about expressing a heartfelt desire to see a FTA stretching across the whole continent.
This was right after Hillary decided to rally against the TPP. This undermined that move and made it ring hollow.
>the existence of the emails was enough to feed into the existing narrative that Clinton couldn't be trusted
As opposed to diffing her public moves with what she said in the emails? You seriously think that the mere existence of leaked emails was enough to sway voters regardless of what was actually said in them?
> As opposed to diffing her public moves with what she said in the emails? You seriously think that the mere existence of leaked emails was enough to sway voters regardless of what was actually said in them?
Those same emails motivated someone to drive 300 miles to fire a gun in a pizza shop looking for a child sex ring in a basement that didn't exist.
You are conflating leaks. There was a DNC leak and a Podesta personal email leak. The Podesta leak started the fire, so to speak, while the DNC leak was attributed to Russian meddling.
I understand that there's a long American tradition on blaming shooting sprees on everything BUT easy access to guns, but hear me out:
The fact somebody concocted an utterly absurd story from the leaks and used it to justify a killing spree demonstrates very clearly that the leaks themselves weren't at all necessary for the shooting spree.
They could have concocted pizzagate out of something else. In fact, they probably would have.
And the guy clearly wanted to shoot someone up and was looking for reasons.
A large mass of swing voters can't be expected to behave as irrationally as one crazed Trump supporter with a gun.
I don't think it is unusual for a politician to be in support of a general policy while objecting to a specific implementation and/or expansion of that policy.
And yes, the existence of the emails played a role in how people voted or whether they voted regardless of the content. I mean there was the whole pizzagate thing that was obviously independent of the actual substance of the emails.
You're saying that you think swing voters were probably more influenced by harebrained conspiracy theories pushed by meth addled Trump supporters than... the truth?
I don't know what "truth" you are remarking on here and pizzagate was just the most obvious and extreme example.
Clearly there were people who were turned off by the leaks without actually reading the entire collection or even any of documents. These people were more reacting to the perception of the leaks in the zeitgeist than the actual substance of the documents they didn't read. I don't know what to say to you if we can't agree on that.
Those aren't contradictory, and both are supported by the evidence.
Which do you actually disagree with, or do you simply not see how both can be true?
Affecting the outcome of an election is not inherently wrong. Foreign countries affecting the outcome of our elections is dangerous, and has historically been very frowned upon. There's reasons that only Americans are allowed to donate to election campaigns. Our elections are supposed to be for _us_. If whatever countries want a particular outcome start having an outsized voice, our elections will be even less connected to what's best for Americans than they already were.
I disagreed that there was nothing in the emails and explained below.
I also disagree with the notion that a foreign power revealing truths about a candidate is wrong. If you reject a foreign truth over a domestic lie you reject the very heart of democracy itself.
It's all the more ironic given the amount of meddling the US has done in foreign elections, including Russia's.
You didn't really say what was in them that you found valuable, unless I missed it? What important truths did they reveal?
Okay, but then you're welcoming well-funded nations to spend outsized money and effort on attacking whatever candidate they will get the least from. How does that not devolve into our elections just being playthings of our enemies?
What is ironic about this? I also do not think that the US should meddle in foreign elections, but that doesn't really have anything to do with this.
While the content in the Podesta emails was not of any interest in itself, the existence of the dump suggested there was something being revealed and Wikileaks hype and misleading editorializing around the leaks is how Pizzagate became a thing.
It's not schizophrenic - the reality is that false editorializing about a leak can deeply mislead people even if the real content of the leak is completely innocuous (e.g. someone ordering a pizza).
You seriously think pizzagate is what swung the election? That it was a conspiracy theory that you think resonated with multidinous swing voters as opposed to a core of rabid Trump supporters?
And that they couldn't have come up with something equally harebrained without the emails?
I don't think Pizzagate swung the election, but it shows how Wikileaks approach to disinformation works, and illustrates that despite the fact of there being nothing of any real note in the leaked emails, the mere fact of Wikileaks posting them and posting dishonest editorializing about them did have a real impact on public opinion with Pizzagatge being evidence of that.
It’s also worth asking how it fed into the backdrop of a multi-decade campaign portraying both Clinton as liars engaged in criminal conspiracies. It seems plausible that it wouldn’t have worked on most politicians but still could have been enough to get a few thousand people to stay home thinking that maybe this meant there was more to all of the other make believe tales which have been getting spread since the 1990s. They didn’t need to flip votes or even get a very long effect — a few days was enough.
Using the term "disinfo" for "accurate but incomplete info" seems like an Orwellian misuse of the term.
Are there any credible sources indicating that Wikileaks selectively edited or chose what to publish based on political goals? I think they have some sort of process to validate legitimacy of leaks before they publish them, but I've never heard claims that they intentionally edited or chose not to leak information for Wikileaks own political goals.
Certainly possible that Russia leaked true-but-incomplete information to Wikileaks, but isn't, like, all discussion of reality true-but-incomplete?
I view the GRU stealing private data and using Wikileaks to coordinate releasing for the purpose of sowing discord and possibly to help Trump win the election as disinfo.
> After the Soviet term became widely known in the 1980s, native speakers of English broadened the term as "any government communication (either overt or covert) containing intentionally false and misleading material, often combined selectively with true information, which seeks to mislead and manipulate either elites or a mass audience."[3]
- March 16: Internal WikiLeaks messages indicate the purpose of the archive is to annoy Clinton and establish WikiLeaks as a "resource/player" in the election.[29]:44–45
- June 14: The GRU uses its @dcleaks_ persona to reach out to WikiLeaks and offer to coordinate the release of sensitive information about Clinton, including financial documents.[353][29]:45
- June 22: WikiLeaks reaches out to "Guccifer 2.0" via Twitter. They ask "Guccifer 2.0" to send them material because it will have a bigger impact if they publish it. They also specifically ask for material on Clinton they can publish before the convention.[256]
I'm not saying Assange is guilty of any crimes, or doctored evidence. But Wikileaks had an agenda beyond "the facts".
Even if selection of information released is determined 100% by bias, I still think it's dangerous and bad for society to label accurate information releases as "disinfo"
I think the
>containing intentionally false and misleading material
portion of the definition is crucial.
By all means, call it foreign election interference or a foreign propaganda campaign. But in my opinion, accurate information can never be 'disinfo'. I think this is a slippery slope towards discrediting all information that embarrasses or threatens the state: whistleblowers, investigative reporting on war crimes and corruption, etc.
This is like saying the definition of malevolent hacking does not include social engineering or phishing. You can try to define away the problem, but you're going to have some wide-open holes in your defenses as a result.
[on edit:] And the second point is that Wikileaks, as free-speech ideologues, didn't actually NEED to be explicitly complicit to act as a vector for psyops. If you know your opponent is going to throw rock every time, you can win by throwing paper every time. If you're a Fancy Bear and know that Wikileaks will publish whatever you give them, then you can selectively choose what to hand them.
Wikileaks disinfo has almost always been in deeply misleading and sometimes explicitly false editorializing and framing of leaks rather than the content.
They also post a lot of misinformation to their Twitter account - falsely claiming Bob Beckel was a Clinton staffer, boosting the false Seth Rich story, boosting bogus Clinton health claims, and much more besides.
They're very biased, and their biases come out in what they choose to publish, what they refuse to publish, and how they choose to editorialize, and in one known case in selective editing of a leak, but in general the leaks themselves aren't "false information" but are documents which they're spreading to create a specific narrative, and in several cases like the Syria, Podesta, DCCC, and DNC leaks it's clear they're serving as a front for Russian intelligence agencies to spread a specific narrative to aid Russian goals rather than further the truth. Since they serve as a front for foreign intelligence agencies, it's totally possible they're getting drops from other intelligence agencies with similar agendas.
Interesting, that's the first I've read of the selective editing claim. It seems like there is some room for ambiguity (What if RevoluSec intentionally withheld these emails to discredit wikileaks? Is RevoluSec CIA/NSA?) but certainly shifts my bayesian priors a bit. Thanks for sharing.
Short of evidence that they published falsehoolds, I'd still argue that "disinfo" is a misnomer. But your above points certainly demonstrate biased reporting, as is found in any other journalistic organization.
I think classifying 'stolen' data that is accurate being released as "disinfo" is a horrifying and dangerous precedent.
Where do you draw the line between what wikileaks did and other investigative reporting that uses information from whistleblowers? Were the pentagon papers disinfo?
It seems like your position taken to its extreme would disregard all information except info willingly broadcasted by the state, and make us blind to stories of war crimes, corruption, anything else that embarrasses or threatens the state.
The issue isn't the content of the data. It's the context of the release.
You're trying to threaten a slippery slope wherein all information needs to be state sanctioned, but the definition of disinformation makes it clear that the only time information gains that moniker is when it's actively being spread to mislead for malicious purposes.
Quite the contrary to your 'extreme' extrapolation, the term disinformation allows us to identify the use of malicious state-sponsored information warfare. It FIGHTS state sponsored narratives. It doesn't support it.
