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The Tech Policy Press Podcast
X is a Preferred Tool for American Propaganda. What Does It Mean?
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Good morning. I'm Justin Hendricks, editor of Tech Policy Press. We publish news, analysis and perspectives on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy. Last week, the Guardian reported that United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has directed American embassies and consulates to counter foreign propaganda. Notably, the cable seen by the Guardian apparently endorses Elon Musk's X as an innovative tool to help do it, even as it encourages diplomats to coordinate with the U.S. military Psychological Operations Unit to counter what the administration deems as disinformation. Today's guest says the State Department issuing a formal cable endorsing a specific social media platform for use in its messaging and doing so in the same document that it encourages collaboration with military psychological operations have been nearly unthinkable until recent months. But it's just the latest in a series of developments that suggest Elon Musk's ex is regarded as the preferred tool of the state.
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Let's jump right in.
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My name is Kate Kleinick. I'm a professor of Law at St. John's University and senior editor at Lawfair.
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Kate, the last time you were on this podcast, we talked about what we were dubbing the dumbest timeline. It was all about the TikTok band. I think we might still be in the dumb timeline.
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I wouldn't argue with you. I would say it's only gotten dumber, especially on the TikTok ban.
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Yeah, TikTok ban did not work out the way I think some folks expected. And, and maybe it'll come up a little bit in our conversation today. We're going to talk about this piece that you have in Lawfare on Wednesday. The State Department's X Directive and the end of platform independence. We had this piece in the Guardian. US Directs embassies to team up against foreign hostility and use X to counter American propaganda. Tell us what happened. What did the Guardian uncover?
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Yeah, so I guess that they got a hold of a diplomatic cable that came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that directed foreign MU's and consulates around the world that were US embassies, obviously, to launch coordinated campaigns for American propaganda and to. To explicitly push American propaganda and to counter foreign propaganda. And I think the. One of the most significant parts of this is that Rubio endorses in this diplomatic cable specifically using X as opposed to like any other types of platforms to do this work. And he also specifically kind of mentions that he's going that it should be coordinated with Military Information Support Operations, MISO or what was formerly known as miso, which is now known as psyop. The military is Psycholog Operations Unit. And that entire idea was basically kind of to carry out this US funded narrative that feels like it came from the bottom up, feels organic, feels like it's just a thing that's happening, but it's actually kind of a directed propaganda campaign. And I just, I found this to be a remarkable kind of high watermark of something that's been slowly. I mean, it's like kind of we've been frogs and boiling water for a long time. And I guess like this was like the moment that I'm like, okay, if you haven't hopped out now, like, you're never gonna hop out. Like, you, like, you have to look at this and like decide that this is, like, this is too much.
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Okay, so let's step back just a second and let's talk about how you arrive at that conclusion. So we got a cable endorsing a particular social media platform by name. The tool of US Diplomacy. That's what your, your deck says on the Lawfare piece. This appears to, you know, have some, some fascinating details. The US Government both taking on covert and, and overt messaging in order to kind of do its thing. I mean, this isn't the first time we've heard this, right? I mean, the US Government has been up to this stuff for a while. We've seen various other, you know, propaganda campaigns utilizing social media. What makes this different?
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Yeah, there's a couple of things that make this different. One is that X would, you know, be totally fine at like, being openly like a tool of the US Government. That is kind of a significant part of this. There's also just the openness of it. The formal cable endorsing this specific social media platform and psychological operations is, is just. It would not have been something that happened three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. And this, they're just. That takes place in kind of a landscape of slow changes that have changed the legal accountability, the operational independence of the plat, and kind of like how these institutions have been resilient to this new administration and all of the pressures of kind of tech oligarchs and all of that kind of has combined to kind of make this, this moment also one of like immense hypocrisy from the right, which has pushed this since 2021. This incredibly robust kind of narrative, or like they think it's robust, this kind of fabricated narrative. They robustly pushed a fabricated narrative of essentially the tech platforms and the censorship industrial Complex, so to speak, working with government to take down or keep up certain types of content or to propagandize other types of content. All of these types of things. Specifically, they've claimed a silencing of right wing voices and a prom like, and a promotion of left wing voices and things like that. And so now you have like literally like the, the government telling individuals in government to use platforms to push this and that they will find help and like, and, and avenues to do it through X. And it's just, it's just so different than, you know, the world that we lived in. I mean, pre. I mean, I guess as I kind of spell out in the piece, pre, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
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So I've got going through my mind Jack Balkan's triangle. You know, we've got, you know, state power on the one hand and we've got kind of the, you know, private power and platforms on the other hand, that users on the other kind of third leg of that triangle. This feels like a real collapse in a way. We're seeing this kind of triangle, you know, fold in on itself a little bit just with regard to this campaign. Is that kind of the way you're thinking about it in your head a bit?
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Yeah, 100%. I love Jack Balkans and I think I've done it on this, on this podcast with you before. Jack Balkans beast triangle. Jack starts his description by saying that like essentially for most, most of world history, we're in a dyadic model, which is just the concern of the state censoring people. And you have the press kind of pushing back against that. You have other types of things in service of that. But the real concern is like the boot of the state on the neck of people and silencing the right to freedom of expression. And the Internet creates through like speech platforms, through social media, through all of these things, this third prong. Adding that node to and creating a triangle is like an incredibly empowering thing for speech, an incredibly empowering thing for citizens. I mean, as we've kind of found out, it is also an incredibly powerful thing for governments to route around a lot of like the privacy laws and protections that we have in this country and to surveil citizens through these platforms. But essentially you kind of have this third node, so you can route around censorship. You can keep your stuff up if your government takes it down. And one of the things, I guess when we say like we're, we're describing this and you're saying it's a kind of collapsing I say yes. One of the things that I have been worried about, and I think this is just the triangle is a perfect kind of visualization to understand it, is this collapse of these two nodes getting closer and closer together and essentially the. The closeness of the state and the platform, these two powers, which are like the biggest and most obvious powers and have the least collective action problems as compared to users citizens on the other side is like that. Essentially, the closer that government and industry and platforms get, the more they can align and coordinate against user citizens, the greater the risk to user citizens, privacy and speech. And Rubio is kind of cabled to this in this regard. A lot of the things that have happened in the last 15 months are indicative of kind of that collapse and that alignment.
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And of course, you know, sitting at the center of this situation at the moment, Elon Musk, this character who was in the United States government, clearly close relationship with the Republican Party, seemed like he might be on the outs a bit with the administration. Now, right back in the fact that Rubio's cable calls the company, not just mentioning the company, but labeling it innovative feels like it tells us something about Musk's role in all of this. What exactly is going on here? Whose political objectives are being served?
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Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely part of this. Because to understand this on many levels, I kind of take the piece that I wrote up in Lawfare. I took. It goes back to basically the early 2000s, and all of the things these platforms did or used to do in order to kind of push back on government control or government use of the platforms to do various types of things, whether it be like pushing back on subpoenas or going to court over, you know, right to be forgotten. There's just like a whole host of things. But I think that the better place to start is Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022, because the structural consequences of that transaction are super significant. You took a publicly traded company, which you might not, you might think that corporate governance has light power, but it was more. It was more than we have now. And essentially what you had was you had two things. You had FEC disclosures that had to kind of come through. You knew whether or not, uh, like what the company was doing, whether it was losing money or making money, you had some concept of kind of what was happening, what its structure was like. And then you remove all of that from another type of transparent obligation, which is that of the pressure of the corporate board and representing public shareholders. And those shareholders needed to care about brand safety and advertiser concerns and advertisers and brand safety are dependent on trust and safety and content moderation to make sure that Twitter is, was making money and like making good on their investment. And so if you just become a private company, you don't have a board, you have to please, you don't have shareholders, you have to please, you can just completely eliminate. And that's what he did. And that's the structural piece of this, the entire kind of operations wing that does trust and safety because you don't have any reporting requirements, no one cares if you make money. You can take in fact a completely terrible business decision and fold it into a bunch of other things like SpaceX as he did and Xai, and make it a couple trillion dollar valuation because you just, you don't even. It's a private company or none of those companies are public yet, although there's about to be an ipo. None of those companies are public. Yes, they don't need merger approval. And so all of that happens and it's outside the realm of any type of, of pushback or accountability from even the market. Like, even the market doesn't have any type of account, like any way to hold Musk accountable on X or Twitter. And so that's a huge change. And that also means that Musk can just like, really, he can be as absolutely like evil like billionaire megalomaniac dictator about the speech policies of X as he wants to be. He can shadow, ban and downrank whoever he wants to. He has kicked tons of people and banned them on the platform. He promoted his own posts and the posts of his friends. He like has, you know, is openly working with far right movements in Europe before elections to kind of promote various parties and demote other types of parties. All of these things are happening and there's no type of pushback from a board, anything other than essentially like the European Union, who is trying to kind of bring him to heel under the Digital Services Act. But that is a key piece to why all of this works and why Rubio likely thinks that X is in fact an innovative platform for this because it's willing to play ball in a way none of the platforms have ever played ball before.
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I'm trying to imagine, I mean, just kind of going back to our conversation on TikTok, I'm trying to imagine how the United States would have read this or how people would have read this in the United States if we came across a cable signed by a Chinese foreign minister. TikTok, you know, as an innovative platform to conduct messaging campaigns on behalf of the Chinese government. It sort of feels like it's the same thing effectively. And other governments around the world should more or less read it that way.
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Yeah, I mean, that's one way in this, in which this is significant. The other thing is the fact that this is like essentially a tacit acknowledgment that the government trusts X and believes that X is more responsive to its goals than other platforms are. Essentially, you could read this as they think that they have X in their pocket, that it is like a pseudo government, like in service of the, of the, of the US Government platform. And that's terrifying.
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I was just going to say it's, you know, it's not that long ago, you know, that Metta literally reported, you know, hey, the US Government is engaged in covert propaganda campaign to, you know, undermine Chinese Covid vaccines. And you know, under previous regime, Twitter was, as you say, kind of more likely to have a little institutional pushback against the U.S. government or other governments that might want to engage in various information operations. But this just seems like, hey, we're in business and our goals are completely aligned. We've got a certain set of politics we want to advance. The owner of X is on board and we're in business.
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Exactly. And so I think that there is at the end of the day, this cable and like, the messages that we just kind of discussed and you just summarized are of what this communicates that like X is in line with the US government. It is, I don't know, the most open and obvious admission, in my opinion, of a future that we've kind of been coming for a while, which is that there was a lot of trust we had that platforms would push back on government control and that that would be in their interest to do in various ways. And instead what we've basically seen is that billionaires have realized that they can buy a one of the most massive speech platforms in the world and then sell it to the highest bidder government for propaganda purposes. And that they will own a seemingly organic website with like 250 million people at least on it that is looks like it's organic content that will essentially be used for pushing certain types of diplomatic or government agendas. If he will do this for Rubio, what is to stop him from doing this for Modi? What is to stop him for doing this for Orban, what is to stop him for doing? I mean, who knows if he's already doing that for, for all of these, these, all of These different kind of authoritarian governments. And you have, you have that future just here. And I think that for a long time I. A lot of us who watch this space were like waiting and hoping that the tension and the war between governments and platforms was actually, even though there was such a push for regulation, I think that there was a fear that it would drive these two players closer together and that they would start cooperating. And this is, in my opinion, like a realization of that fear.
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I want to press you just a little bit on what this should mean for Europe and for leaders there. You know, the State Department has announced its very kind of, in my view, interventionist policy towards Europe. It wants to advance far right interests there. It wants to, you know, mold Europe in, in the kind of politics that the current administration thinks would be most advantageous. A lot of Europeans still on X, a lot of European journalists, leaders, they weren't really part of the exodus that you saw perhaps a little bit more in the United States. I don't know. What do you, what do you make? Is, is X going to be a great channel to feed propaganda towards Europeans or to accomplish these various political goals?
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I think that the other thing to remember here is that some of this push that you've been hearing from J.D. vance, from Brandon Carr, the chair of the FCC, this going over to Europe and pushing kind of this agenda of free speech and the claims that the Digital Services act are sensorial in some way of US Tech companies, that that's not actually such a righteous talking point. That it's actually not that they're super worried about that is the beard for what they're actually trying to do was essentially to job like to job on for this idea that they would like the laws of Europe to not be and the fines to not be exercised as strongly against these tech companies. And that I think in my opinion, maybe that's like, maybe some people will say that's a cynical take, but I think it's just a realistic take because nothing that they're doing at home shows that they have any commitment to freedom of expression, for sure. That essentially that's actually what's happening. It's not really that they care that Europe is going to be taken in by their propaganda. It's that they really are just trying to increase the influence that will make it so that they're protectionists, that they're doing their due diligence and being protectionist of US Tech companies.
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Let's just also focus a little on Murthy v. Missouri. You talk about legal questions that were left unresolved. You talk about the politics of that case, the political coalition that put it together, how they I suppose are exposed in this as a bit hypocritical.
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Yeah, I mean it's the same vein of kind of the hypocrisy that I spoke of before. It's just Rich coming from the right and from Rubio and others. After 2021 there has been this absolutely fabricated narrative kind of over dramatized. I mean and it's not just me saying if there were drama tests. I just want to be really clear. This case, Murthy v. Missouri, which was a case in which it was a case that they brought while Biden was in office, accusing the. The Biden administration of contacting members of tech companies and people in tech companies and demanding or threatening some type of government action in order to get certain types of. Certain types of content removed from various social media platforms. Things that talked about the genesis of COVID things that talked about anti COVID vaccine kind of chatter, all of these types of various non CDC approved messaging that they, that they wanted to have taken down. This is like called jawboning. It's contrary to the first Amendment. And they brought a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court and it was literally laughed at. Like I listened to the oral arguments. I'm sure you did too, Justin. Like it was like the justices were like what do you have here? Why is this case here? And then you have Amy Coney Bear basically write the opinion that says there's nothing in the factual record to support any of this and send it back down to basically because of lack standing. And so I just think that like you have this administration that is so quick to point the finger or to claim censorship when the government talks with any social media platform and now you have the Secretary of State telling everyone in foreign offices around the world to do propaganda in order to kind of make an innovative push and that it will basically be the best place to do this type of work because it'll be the most conducive in the content moderation policies are be the most favorable. And I mean it's just exactly, it's like more than what it's way worse than anything that they had evidence of in the Biden administration. And there just seems to be no trace of irony and no trace of just like when the. That they have just switched this position now that this shoe is on the other foot and that they're in charge of the government and that they have friends that are running these social media platforms. And it's an incredible lack of principle and hypocrisy.
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So I guess the rationale would be, you know, this isn't about American speech, this is about changing views abroad.
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Yeah, I think that if this hadn't been such an over cable that was sent to every single office, no one's breaking news that, like, that the US engages in propaganda abroad, like that's, you know, that every nation doesn't have some type of kind of propaganda push and tries to kind of convey, to create and shape the narrative on their government in other places, it's the fact that it specifically being an openly being directed by the Secretary of State through kind of psychological operations, and to my mind that it's specifically endorsing one particular favorably positioned platform. It just speaks that essentially that X has been bought by the Trump administration. It certainly hasn't been bought by the US Government. As far as, in my personal opinion, I don't think that this will be the favored platform of a Democratic administration. And I think that that's just kind of, that's just kind of an incredible, it's an incredible statement. And that is, I think, the big takeaway. Not that there is propaganda happening abroad or that, you know, that the US Engages in it, but how we're going about it and how we're leveraging these, these online spaces.
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So you end your piece by saying the question is no longer whether the government can use social media as a tool of statecraft. It already is. The question now is whether any institution, legal, normative or structural, retains the capacity to check it. What do you think? You kind of step back. You've been watching these issues for a long time. Maybe we have reached a real low point here. Seems like it could still get worse. I never want to discount that it could get worse. Certainly tomorrow we'll read some new piece of news that will indicate we've reached yet another level rung lower. Can you cast your mind forward? Is there any solution to these issues to sort of maintain that balance that is, I suppose, contemplated by that triangle we talked about, you know, how to kind of keep some institutional protection moving in both directions or in all directions. I suppose between government, you know, the private sector platforms, media on the other hand, and user citizens on the other.
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I mean, I honestly, I'm not super optimistic at this exact moment. And I spent the last 15 months, as I know a lot of people have, trying to figure out new theories of change to kind of get at this type of, this new incapacity of legal systems and this new incapacity of norms to or media to kind of control or contain any of these types of transgressions. I guess, I mean, I guess that there are still avenues through the legal system. We are seeing courts push back generally on things that the administration is doing and the administration generally abiding by those rulings. You are seeing them continue to kind of openly go flout kind of what we have known to be until this point. But I, I mean I think that like the midterms could bring a small vestige of ideally like kind of congressional pushback on this rampant executive power. And honestly I just don't know if they're going to continue to have, the government is going to continue to have the resources in light of the war in Iran to like to be fighting on so many fronts. There's not going to be like particularly powerful or they just don't have a lot of time or space or energy to devote to like bothering like the EU on behalf of tech companies when they have all of a massive energy crisis. Right. And so like tech kind of like is very important, especially in AI, but it will fall slightly below like not having any type of energy to run the data centers that all of this AI is kind of based off of. So I do think that like maybe that will. Wow, I just found myself, I'm like, oh, I'm actually finding myself arguing for the energy crisis, that it will slow everything down and suck up like everybody, like the, the, like the administration's time and capacity so much that they won't be able to continue kind of waging this war on freedom of expression. But I guess, yes, that's kind of where I am.
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I suppose if we're going to slide into authoritarianism, anything that might sort of, you know, stand in the way, we might regard as a positive development, even if it's extraordinarily painful.
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I think that you are seeing the legal system stand up and rule against current administration and depending on where you land and like the political spectrum, I do think that there is a future in which the rule of law at least comes back and a lot of the principles that our democracy adheres to are reinvested in and things like freedom of expression and non government interference with private speech, all of those types of ideas. And so I think it is going to be kind of the fight of a lot of people's lifetimes. It's going to be a fight in which a lot of the things that we've spent the 90s, the 2000s, like people generally have spent pushing forward more progressive agendas. I think that those agendas are going to unfortunately be at the wayside for quite a while. And we're going to have a period in which people are on more of a defensive foot as they're confronting these issues and trying to make sure that we don't lose all semblance of freedom of expression. The concepts of freedom of expression and the right of citizens to speak up against their governments.
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Is there a future where you see a real reset though between Silicon Valley and Washington? I mean this, this feels like a, almost a kind of like an inevitable trajectory to me that, you know, the kind of concentration of wealth, the concentration of power would eventually combine. Is there a world where that goes back to a happier, healthier place in any real way?
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I don't know how dark you want me to get here, Justin, but like honestly the only thing that can in my opinion kind of push back against these individuals who many of them net worth outweighs or is larger than the nations in Europe and their entire gdp. I don't know how you get at that, especially in kind of this global world, in this global economy, you could say taxes, but honestly there's like no. Like you can just forum shop for taxes and you can forum shop for favorable types of places to live and you can go wherever you are and run your empire from wherever. And so like it's just, I just think it's actually, I think it is going to be the problem of the future is kind of how to constrain the complete kleptocracy of. Of our governments by a trillionaire billionaire few. And it's a good fight, but it is going to be incredibly difficult.
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Kate, I gotta ask you about one last thing that was in the press this week. Casey Newton had a piece on his Platformer newsletter about the oversight board and the idea that apparently Meta has discussed ending funding for it. You are someone who knows the oversight board and its early constitution better than anyone. I understand you were, you know, embedded there. I wrote about it for the New Yorker early on. I don't know. What do you make of this?
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I mean actually it's kind of in keeping with the theme of the. This piece that I wrote and kind of everything we've discussed, frankly, I think that the oversight board and I will. I'm. I'm working on a piece about this as well and so hopefully I'll have that out next week sometime. So watch this space specifically at Lothair. But the big picture is that I essentially think that the Oversight board was this incredibly optimistic, incredibly promising moment in which we tried to empower the node of the triangle that was citizen users without the use of government. And some can say that it was a self regulatory dream that never was going to have teeth and was a waste of money and never was going to have any type of purchase. There's a lot of things that you can say about the Oversight Board, but one thing that you can say about what it's done in the last five years is do a light or trivial treat any of these issues as light or trivial and not taken its job incredibly seriously. It has been staffed by incredible people. It has an amazing set of board members who've written very, very smart decisions that are incredibly thoughtful. It has done a great job kind of creating a signal through the noise of the civil society and various interest groups to feed back to Meta so they can change their policies. And they have had so many of has had a huge effect on the content moderation policies of the platform at least until 15 months ago. And I think they still have an effect on it. But I think the big picture of it is that it speaks to an era that now seems so quaint, it now seems so gone. An era of new governance, an era of multi stakeholderism, an era of cooperation and good faith and platforms really wanting to do the right thing and not being completely driven by the bottom line. Even when people thought that they were like, they, they just like there were moments I, I believe when I spoke to Mark Zuckerberg that he believed that the oversight board was the right thing to do and that's why he was doing it. I do not think, I mean he thought it would maybe get him out of some like hot water on content moderation decisions. But I think he also thought it was the right thing to do and I think he's changed his mind. I don't think this was all, I don't think that this was all kind of a ruse from the get go. So I guess in that sense the idea that the Oversight board will get phased out is like one of them for me. It just like it seems inevitable, but it also just seems like inevitable because of the time that we're living in. It just seems like it speaks to a way of doing business that no one is doing business is a. Why would Meta keep doing business in this way? Like no one is doing multi stakeholderism anymore. No one is caring about these things. That is all turned into kind of a pay to play and brinksmanship and you know, bottom line mentality. And so I think that, you know, it's, it, it's just of a different time. And I think that we will look back and kind of be a little bit regretful that we didn't try to push for more buy in from that, from other platforms, that we didn't try to mandate that platforms have organizations like the oversight board to speak to users rights and principles generally and to give feedback on what the policies are on the site. I think that we're going to regret that, but I don't know. We'll see.
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Well, and Casey does report that there's possibly some solution where the board gets hived off and goes on its own. Truly independent, I suppose, maybe even entirely independent of Meta's funding. So I guess that story is not entirely written yet. We'll see what happens. There's certainly a long time between now and 2028. I'll just have to have you back on. We'll talk about it in a little more depth when we have more details.
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And there's a lot that I think that I can add in kind of context and analysis. And I have some more reporting that I think is going to be a little bit more of the story and what's going to happen with the oversight board. And yeah, I think that, I think that it's, you know, it's definitely just going to be a thing that I'm always going to be glad happened no matter how it ends up in the next couple of years.
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Well, Kate Clonik, thank you so much. You can find her writing these days over at lawfare and look forward to having you back on again. See if we've escaped from that dumbest timeline. That's it for this episode. I hope you'll send your feedback. You can write to me at justinettechpolicy Press. Thanks to my guest, thanks to my co founder Brian Jones and thank you for listening.
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Tech policy press.