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Protest misinformation is riding on the success of pandemic hoaxes | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/10/1002934/protest-propaganda-is-riding-on-the-success-of-pandemic-hoaxes

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Misinformation about police brutality protests is being spread by the same sources as covid-19 denial. The troubling results suggest what might come next.

by Joan Donovan
June 10, 2020

Police confront Black Lives Matter protesters in Los Angeles
JOSEPH NGABO ON UNSPLASH
After months spent battling covid-19, the US is now gripped by a different fever. As the video of George Floyd being murdered by Derek Chauvin circulated across social media, the streets around America—and then the world—have filled with protesters. Floyd’s name has become a public symbol of injustice in a spiraling web of interlaced atrocities endured by Black people, including Breonna Taylor, who was shot in her home by police during a misdirected no-knock raid, and Ahmaud Arbery, who was murdered by a group of white vigilantes. 

Meanwhile, on the digital streets, a battle over the narrative of protest is playing out in separate worlds, where truth and disinformation run parallel. 

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In one version, tens of thousands of protesters are marching to force accountability on the US justice system, shining a light on policing policies that protect white lives and property above anything else—and are being met with the same brutality and indifference they are protesting against. In the other, driven by Donald Trump, US attorney general Bill Barr, and the MAGA coalition, an alternative narrative contends that anti-fascist protesters are traveling by bus and plane to remote cities and towns to wreak havoc. This notion is inspiring roving gangs of mostly white vigilantes to take up arms. 

These armed activists are demographically very similar to those who spread misinformation and confusion about the pandemic; the same Facebook groups have spread hoaxes about both; it’s the same older Republican base that shares most fake news. 

The fact that those who accept protest misinformation also rose up to challenge stay-at-home orders through “reopen” rallies is no coincidence: these audiences have been primed by years of political misinformation and then driven to a frenzy by months of pandemic conspiracy theories. The infodemic helped reinforce routes for spreading false stories and rumors; it’s been the perfect breeding ground for misinformation.

How it happened
When covid-19 hit like a slow-moving hurricane, most people took shelter and waited for government agencies to create a plan for handling the disease. But as the weeks turned into months, and the US still struggled to provide comprehensive testing, some began to agitate. Small groups, heavily armed with rifles and misinformation, held “reopen” rallies that were controversial for many reasons. They often relied on claims that the pandemic was a hoax perpetrated by the Democratic Party, which was colluding with the billionaire donor class and the World Health Organization. The reopen message was amplified by the anti-vaccination movement, which exploited the desire for attention among online influencers and circulated rampant misinformation suggesting that a potential coronavirus vaccine was part of a conspiracy in which Bill Gates planned to implant microchips in recipients. 

These rallies did not gain much legitimacy in the eyes of politicians, press, or the public, because they seemed unmoored from the reality of covid-19 itself. 

But when the Black Lives Matter protests emerged and spread, it opened a new political opportunity to muddy the waters. President Trump laid the foundation by threatening to invade cities with the military after applying massive force in DC as part of a staged television event. The cinema of the state was intended to counter the truly painful images of the preceding week of protests, where footage of the police firing rubber bullets, gas, and flash grenades dominated media coverage of US cities on fire. Rather than acknowledge the pain and anguish of Black people in the US, Trump went on to blame “Antifa” for the unrest. 

@Antifa_US was suspended by Twitter, but this screenshot continues to circulate among right wing groups on Facebook.
For many on the left, antifa simply means “anti-fascist.” For many on the right, however, “Antifa” has become a stand-in moniker for the Democratic Party. In 2017, we similarly saw right-wing pundits and commentators try to rebrand their political opponents as the “alt-left,” but that failed to stick. 

Shortly after Trump’s declaration, several Twitter accounts outed themselves as influence operations bent on calling for violence and collecting information about anti-fascists. Twitter, too, confirmed that an “Antifa” account, running for three years, was tied to a now-defunct white nationalist organization that had helped plan the Unite the Right rally that killed Heather Heyer and injured hundreds more. Yet the “alt-right” and other armed militia groups that planned this gruesome event in Charlottesville have not drawn this level of concern from federal authorities.

@OCAntifa Posted this before the account was suspended on Twitter for platform manipulation.
Disinformation stating that the protests were being inflamed by Antifa quickly traveled up the chain from impostor Twitter accounts and throughout the right-wing media ecosystem, where it still circulates among calls for an armed response. This disinformation, coupled with widespread racism, is why armed groups of white vigilantes are lining the streets in different cities and towns. Simply put, when disinformation mobilizes, it endangers the public.

What next?
As researchers of disinformation, we have seen this type of attack play out before. It’s called “source hacking”: a set of tactics where media manipulators mimic the patterns of their opponents, try to obfuscate the sources of their information, and then slowly become more and more dangerous in their rhetoric. Now that Trump says he will designate Antifa a domestic terror group, investigators will have to take a hard look at social-media data to discern who was actually calling for violence online. They will surely unearth this widespread disinformation campaign of far-right agitators.

That doesn’t mean that every call to action is suspect: all protests are poly-vocal and many tactics and policy issues remain up for discussion, including the age-old debate on reform vs. revolution. But what is miraculous about public protest is how easy it is to perceive and document the demands of protesters on the ground. 

Moments like this call for careful analysis. Journalists, politicians, and others must not waver in their attention to the ways Black organizers are framing the movement and its demands. As a researcher of disinformation, I am certain there will be attempts to co-opt or divert attention from the movement’s messaging, attack organizers, and stall the progress of this movement. Disinformation campaigns tend to proceed cyclically as media manipulators learn to adapt to new conditions, but the old tactics still work—such as impostor accounts, fake calls to action (like #BaldForBLM), and grifters looking for a quick buck. 

Crucially, there is an entire universe of civil society organizations working to build this movement for the long haul, and they must learn to counter misinformation on the issues they care about. More than just calling for justice, the Movement for Black Lives and Color of Change are organizing actions to move police resources into community services. Media Justice is doing online trainings under the banner of #defendourmovements, and Reclaim the Block is working to defund the police in Minneapolis. 

Through it all, one thing remains true: when thousands of people show up to protest in front of the White House, it is not reducible to fringe ideologies or conspiracy theories about invading outside agitators. People are protesting during a pandemic because justice for Black lives can’t wait for a vaccine.

—Joan Donovan, PhD, is research director Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

#Fake_news #Extrême_droite #Etats_unis

How to turn filming the police into the end of police brutality | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/10/1002913/how-to-end-police-brutality-filming-witnessing-legislation

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Of all the videos that were released after George Floyd’s murder, the one recorded by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier on her phone is the most jarring. It shows Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck as Floyd pleads, “Please, please, please, I can’t breathe,” and it shows Chauvin refusing to budge. A criminal complaint later states that Chauvin pinned Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, past the point where Floyd fell unconscious. In the footage, Chauvin lifts his head and locks eyes with Frazier, unmoved—a chilling and devastating image.

Documentation like this has galvanized millions of people to flood the streets in over 450 protests in the US and hundreds more in dozens of countries around the world. It’s not just this killing, either. Since the protests have broken out, videos capturing hundreds more incidents of police brutality have been uploaded to social media. A mounted officer tramples a woman. Cop cars accelerate into a crowd. Officers shove an elderly man, who bashes his head when he hits the pavement, and walk away as his blood pools on the ground. One supercut of 14 videos, titled “This Is a Police State,” has been viewed nearly 50 million times.

Once again, footage taken on a smartphone is catalyzing action to end police brutality once and for all. But Frazier’s video also demonstrates the challenge of turning momentum into lasting change. Six years ago, the world watched as Eric Garner uttered the same words—“I can’t breathe”—while NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo strangled him in a chokehold. Four years ago, we watched again as Philando Castile, a 15-minute drive from Minneapolis, bled to death after being shot five times by Officer Jeronimo Yanez at a traffic stop. Both incidents also led to mass protests, and yet we’ve found ourselves here again.

So how do we turn all this footage into something more permanent—not just protests and outrage, but concrete policing reform? The answer involves three phases: first, we must bear witness to these injustices; second, we must legislate at the local, state, and federal levels to dismantle systems that protect the police when they perpetrate such acts; and finally, we should organize community-based “copwatching” programs to hold local police departments accountable.

I. Witnessing

For example, during the first half of the 1800s, freed slaves like Frederick Douglass relied on newspapers and the spoken word to paint graphic depictions of bondage and galvanize the formation of abolitionist groups. During the early 1900s, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells carefully tabulated statistics on the pervasiveness of lynching and worked with white photographers to capture gruesome images of these attacks in places she couldn’t go. Then in the mid-1950s, black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. strategically attracted broadcast television cameras to capture the brutal scenes of police dogs and water cannons being turned on peaceful demonstrations.

Witnessing, in other words, played a critical role in shocking the majority-white public and eliciting international attention. Whites and others allied with black Americans until the support for change reached critical mass.

Today smartphone witnessing serves the same purpose. It uses imagery to prove widespread, systemic abuse and provoke moral outrage. But compared with previous forms of witnessing, smartphones are also more accessible, more prevalent, and—most notably—controlled in many cases by the hands of black witnesses. “That was a real transition,” says Richardson—“from black people who were reliant upon attracting the gaze of mainstream media to us not needing that mainstream middleman and creating the media for ourselves.”

II. Legislation

But filming can’t solve everything. The unfortunate reality is that footage of one-off instances of police brutality rarely leads to the conviction of the officers involved. Analysis by Witness suggests that it usually leads, at most, to victims’ being acquitted of false charges, if they are still alive.

Some of this can be changed with better tactics: Witness has found, for example, that it can be more effective to withhold bystander footage until after the police report is released. That way police don’t have an opportunity to write their report around the evidence and justify their actions by claiming events off screen. This is what the witness Feiden Santana did after the fatal shooting of Walter Scott, which played a crucial role in getting the police officer charged with second-degree murder.

But then again, this doesn’t always work. The deeper problem is the many layers of entrenched legal protections afforded the police in the US, which limit how effective video evidence can be.

That’s why smartphone witnessing must be coupled with clear policy changes, says Kayyali. Fortunately, given the broad base of support that has coalesced thanks to smartphone witnessing, passing such legislation has also grown more possible.

Since Floyd’s death, a coalition of activists from across the political spectrum, described by a federal judge as “perhaps the most diverse amici ever assembled,” has asked the US Supreme Court to revisit qualified immunity.

III. Copwatching

So we enter phase three: thinking about how to actually change police behavior. An answer may be found with Andrea Pritchett, who has been documenting local police misconduct in Berkeley, California, for 30 years.

Pritchett is the founder of Berkeley Copwatch, a community-based, volunteer-led organization that aims to increase local police accountability. Whereas bystander videos rely on the coincidental presence of filmers, Copwatch members monitor police activity through handheld police scanners and coordinate via text groups to show up and record at a given scene.

Over the decades, Copwatch has documented not just the most severe instances of police violence but also less publicized daily violations, from illegal searches to racial profiling to abuse of unhoused people. Strung together, the videos intimately track the patterns of abuse across the Berkeley police department and in the conduct of specific officers.

In September of last year, armed with such footage, Copwatch launched a publicity campaign against a particularly abusive officer, Sean Aranas. The group curated a playlist of videos of his misconduct and linked it with a QR code posted on flyers around the community. Within two months of the campaign, the officer retired.

Pritchett encourages more local organizations to adopt a similar strategy, and Copwatch has launched a toolkit for groups that want to create similar databases. Ultimately, she sees it not just as an information collection mechanism but also as an early warning system. “If communities are documenting—if we can keep up with uploading and tagging the videos properly—then somebody like Chauvin would have been identified long ago,” she says. “Then the community could take action before they kill again.”

#Police #Violences_policières #Vidéos #Témoignages