The Kremlin’s attempts to influence the upcoming U.S. election are suddenly in the spotlight after the Justice Department yesterday announced a pushback.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the department had indicted two Russia-based employees of RT, Russia’s international news channel—and a key conduit for Russia's disinformation efforts. Konstantine Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva are charged with money laundering, and with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by secretly spreading propaganda in the U.S.
RT and the defendants allegedly funded a U.S. company called Tenet Media that pumped out videos that Garland said “were often consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine.” Tenet then allegedly paid conservative social media influencers to spread these videos, without telling them of Russia’s involvement.
Separately, Garland said the DOJ had seized 32 domains that “Russian public relations companies” had used for a form of cybersquatting—the URLs were similar to those for the likes of Fox News and the Washington Post, but they were again filled with pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine propaganda, and with attempts to secure “Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.”
Here it comes again: “The Russian public relations companies drove viewers to these websites by deploying influencers and paid social media advertisements,” Garland said. “They also created fake social media profiles, posing as U.S. citizens, to post comments on social media platforms with links to the sites.”
Sure sounds like social media platforms ought to be extra-vigilant right now! But, with exquisite timing, a federal appeals court yesterday handed Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, a victory in its quest to avoid having to be transparent about its anti-disinformation efforts.
California has a content moderation law that forces platforms to give the state attorney general detailed reports about what they’re doing to tackle: misinformation and disinformation; hate speech and racism; harassment; extremism and radicalization; and foreign political interference.
There have been First Amendment concerns about the law since it was going through the legislative process a couple years ago, but, last year, X tried and failed to get a court to issue an injunction against the law’s enforcement.
That loss has now been overturned, with the appeals court saying the law’s “content category reports” probably violate the First Amendment because “they are not narrowly tailored to serve the State’s purported goal of requiring social media companies to be transparent about their policies and practices.” The district court now must issue the preliminary injunction against the content moderation law, the future of which is now in doubt.
But even if the government can’t tell Musk what to do about disinformation and other ills—in the U.S. that is; the EU very much can—there are ample reasons for any sensible social media supremo to take content moderation seriously.
For one thing, advertisers don’t like to spend their money in a swamp. Market Research firm Kantar today released a study showing that 26% of marketers plan to reduce ad spend on X, and only 4% thought X provided brand safety (i.e. some kind of guarantee against major embarrassment.) The study said this was “the biggest recorded pullback from any major global ad platform.”
“It’s difficult to feel confident about your brand safety in that environment,” said Kantar director Gonca Bubani, adding that the “stark acceleration” of the advertiser exodus over the last year “means a turnaround currently seems unlikely.”
More news below.
David Meyer
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