Propaganda and Nationwide Monitoring of Conservatives During the 2020 Election

Propaganda and Nationwide Monitoring of Conservatives During the 2020 Election

Moonshot: Disinformation Agent & Pioneer of the Redirect Method

Moonshot is a counter-violent extremist group (CVE). Moonshot's Redirect Method targets users based on the content of their social media comments and posts, as well as their general and browser searches. The Redirect Method uses the data advantages of the tech platforms to target these users, then profiles them, and finally tailors the ad feeds of those users. The "ad feeds" that show up are often far-left (government) propaganda and training[1][2][3][4].

Who develops these software techniques, how are these techniques marketed to tech platforms, and what is the end goal of the Redirect Method? Continue reading to find out.


The Redirect Method

Moonshot. "From Shitposting to Sedition..."

The figure above depicts the Redirect Method on general/browser search, but the technique is used on social media platforms as well. For instance, on the Facebook platform, one of the sources that Moonshot's Redirect Method sends users to is Life After Hate[5]. Life After Hate makes broad claims about groups of people without providing evidence, defends institutional leftist media, trains people to become disinformation agents, trains people to be censors, and believes that people should not participate in debate[4][6]. Furthermore, ConnectFutures served as an advisory role to Facebook and the Life After Hate group for the Redirect Method Facebook campaign[4]. ConnectFutures is a source of Black Lives Matter propaganda, decolonization beliefs, white privilege assertions, collective-leftist learning, targeted propaganda to immigrant communities, and even courses for 7+ year old children [2]. This is an example of primary and secondary sources that Moonshot is responsible for redirecting internet traffic to.

What is the purpose of the Redirect Method? According to Moonshot and other prominent CVEs, these techniques are crucial in the fight against hate, extremism, and terrorism. As a result, the CVE community produces articles over these topics in an attempt to convince clients that their software techniques are necessary to end these threats.


Moonshot and the US Presidential Election

In January 2021, Moonshot released an article titled "From Shitposting to Sedition: Tracking and countering conspiracy theories, disinformation and violence around the 2020 US presidential election"[7]. The article highlights (1) the group's Redirect Method in action, (2) their left-leaning bias, the (3) special data privileges that the group retains from dominant technology platforms, and (4) how deeply the group is imbedded in the US security state.

In September 2020, Moonshot CVE partnered with the Anti- Defamation League (ADL) to proactively monitor and respond to threats of violence and violence-inciting disinformation related to the US Presidential Election. Moonshot produced weekly threat trend reports that informed ADL’s direct outreach to state and local election security officials, and also ran nationwide Redirect Method campaigns to provide users demonstrating interest in extremist violence with credible alternative content.[7]p.4

By Moonshot's definitions in the study, far-right extremism includes

  • Pondering the security of elections
  • Requesting transparency of vaccines
  • Debating the evidence of vaccine effectiveness
  • Any association with the Proud Boys, which have a lower or equal crime rate per member than the national average (divide crime by membership number)
  • Curiosity with "anti-government" conspiracies 7 p.7

Here is a quote to get an idea of how loosely-defined "violence" is by the CVE: "[P]artisanship and political violence have long been part of the American political system"[7]p.33, 37 – a suspicious statement made twice by Moonshot in a single article, and was not supported by evidence or citations.

According to the Moonshot paper, the number of indicators (instances of users being targeted by the Redirect Method) from September to December of 2020 reached 125,000[7]p.7, yet Moonshot neglected to elaborate what the group's methodology and definitions were for data collection, or indicators. As a result, we cannot fully know to what extent Moonshot defines far-right extremism, but the last time I checked, Moonshot had a database of over 40,000 indicators. This means that the CVE categorizes people as "extreme" from a database of over 40,000 words or phrases if that person uses them. This classification scheme is clearly arbitrary.

The CVE uses the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 8 to support the claim that the risk for right-wing extremism is rising. Let's examine Moonshot's standard for evidence with this citation of their's.

The CSIS article

CSIS is a policy research group. Similar to the Wilson Center, CSIS was meant as a link between policy and ideas (politicized academics), yet the group has displayed no competence in data collection or data analysis.

To evaluate the threat posed by terrorism, we compiled a data set of 893 incidents that occurred in the United States between January 1994 and May 8, 2020...These incidents included both attacks and foiled plots. We coded the ideology of the perpetrators into one of five categories: ethnonationalist, left-wing, religious, right-wing, and other... All of the religious attacks and plots in the CSIS data set were committed by terrorists who ascribed to a Salafi-jihadist ideology.[8]

From the CSIS article, far-right terrorism has caused 12-13 deaths per year in the US.[8] The CSIS report argues that right-wing terrorism is likely to rise, but their arguments are based on (speculative) extrapolation, rather than being supported by empirical analysis. From their data, [8][20] I attempted to fit a linear regression model, but since the data points are too few and vary too greatly, the error analysis of the slope did not allow me to deduce an increase or decrease to the data. In summary, the CSIS claims cannot be reproduced; nor can Moonshot's claims, since the CSIS report was cited as support for Moonshot's statement.

On the topic of far-left extremism, the CSIS article listed animal rights extremists and Antifa[20]. Ironically, Antifa was mentioned because CSIS defined left-wing extremism as an opposition to centralized government and capitalism – two ideas that the Black Lives Matter movement also opposes 9. BLM was not considered in CSIS's report despite causing $1-2 billion in damages in a matter of just 2-3 weeks. [9][19]

Myths of the Counter-Violent Extremist Community

Before going back to Moonshot, I should address certain myths of the CVE community. Hate crimes contribute less than 1% of total violent crimes (if intimidation crimes are neglected) and whites contribute proportionally less hate crimes than minorities in America. [9][10][11][12] Far-right terrorism is less significant than far-left terrorism on a global scale; and far-right extremism is due to solitary "lone wolf" actors while far-left terrorism is highly collective and networked. [13][14] This is significant since CVE techniques were developed for collective extremism. Click here for further proof of these claims, and an analysis on why these facts dismantle the CVE agenda.

Moonshot's Inability to Conduct Empirical Analysis

Let's continue to examine what the Moonshot CVE was up to during the 2020 US Presidential Election and aftermath.

The CVE collected a lot of data, but this data does not indicate what the CVE claims it does. The group boasted that "[O]ur Redirect campaign was responding to real-world events, sometimes within hours, in order to safeguard the online space and disrupt incitements to violence from armed groups, and the spread of violence-inciting disinformation."[7]p.7 This is an example of just how much oversight Moonshot is given over a user's activity online, gifted to them with their partnerships with Google, Bing, and the major social media platforms. This is network control in real-time.

Given what we know about extremist, terrorist, and hate crime data, extremism of all sorts (left, right, religious) is exceptionally low in North America. [13][14] As such, the CVE community has to rely on certain methods for justifying their campaigns:

1) A qualitative approach, where a small number of true extremists are used, and unproven connections are drawn between the extremists and a larger data set. The true capabilities of the small sample of extremists are exaggerated in many cases, such as how networked the group is. The Jigsaw CVE is an example of this approach 15 along with many other CVEs that take an insignificant group of extremists and attempt to make claims about an unrelated population.

Think of stereotyping but on a large scale.

2) Data collection without analysis, where definitions are arbitrary and the goal is to collect as much data as possible. Assumptions are then made about what the dataset means, but these assumptions are not proven. Moonshot's report is an example of this approach. 7

Think empirical approach without empirical analysis.

As a CVE that develops Redirect Method software for social media and general search platforms, Moonshot has to claim that there is a threat worthy of their products.

Moonshot dedicated a 4-page section to users searching for DIY explosives and molotov cocktails, yet Moonshot failed to determine what group was searching these topics. 7 Despite many left-leaning protests turning into riots and burned buildings, Moonshot leads readers to assume that these bomb searches were conducted by the far-right. In fact, Moonshot's own reference stated that far-left groups use "improvised explosive devices"[8], yet the CVE neglected to mention it. Either case, the searches for DIY explosives peaked at 75 indicators for one day, but averaged around 10 to 13 searches per day 8 (in a nation of 330 million).

Moonshot mentions the rise of plots of murder, rape, and kidnap, but provides no evidence for these claims. In fact, that entire section is focused on internet memes and humor, where Moonshot laments that the public can engage in "consequence free" 7 p.34 comedy. No prior data exists to compare their results with, so it is a mystery how Moonshot can claim that their data is evidence of a rise when the CVE didn't provide a standard measurement to compare their data to. Also, Moonshot's definitions of violence are arbitrary; but most importantly, rape data does not make an appearance at all in Moonshot's article. Why mention rape then?

Moonshot is the Extremist

Since Moonshot's Redirect Method leads users to third party content, by examining this content, we can gauge Moonshot's values and beliefs. Moonshot does not create content; instead, the group curates playlists that users are redirected to. This highlights the need for Moonshot to network with the tech platforms, government agencies, and content-creating groups.

The Redirect Method relies on curating and surfacing existing online content as opposed to creating new material...Moonshot and ADL [Anti-Defamation League] identified key narratives increasing the risk of election-related violence from armed groups, conspiracy theories, disinformation, and political polarization; and gathered YouTube content that countered, undermined or simply provided a safer alternative to those narratives.[7]p.8
Moonshot does not create content as part of the Redirect Method. We identify credible content from across the internet and arrange it into playlists which can serve to challenge and provide alternatives to extremism. We identify, review, and select thousands of videos for use in the Redirect Method, globally...we deliver this method across the United States and globally.[7]p.3

This is built into the Redirect Method. If Moonshot is left-leaning, then the pages users are being presented are going to be left-leaning. Government agencies and tech platforms will be presented with left-leaning reports that skew the facts.

Clearly, Moonshot has special access to data on search engines and social media platforms; they are partners, after all. The CVE community also has close ties with government agencies. Both of these statements are neatly captured (again) here:

Moonshot conducted ongoing online monitoring, collection and analysis to identify rhetorical patterns, slang, memes, events, new platforms, organizations, individuals, merchandise and iconography. ADL used this intelligence to inform state and local actors, while Moonshot used it to enhance and expand its online campaigns.[7]p.5

Not only is data released to the CVE community, but the CVEs have real-time monitoring capabilities. As shown below, users that click on Redirect ads are even monitored by how long before they stop watching.

Moonshot’s campaigns targeted every county in all 50 states...Over a three-month period, we recorded more than 56,300 high-risk searches...At- risk users engaged with our ads more than 1,300 times. These users then watched more than 2,000 minutes of video developed by credible third parties"[7]p.5

"Credible" means far-left in many cases, as has been well established with Life After Hate and ConnectFutures.

In a demonstration of pure authoritarianism, Moonshot and other CVEs are arguing for more network control, as well as suppression of networks that are not complying:

The swift, decisive action taken by tech companies to shutter fringe platforms paired with the newly aggressive approach of federal law enforcement look to compose a useful model for future threat reduction[7]p.50

Moonshot also is arguing for strengthening partnerships and expanding tracking campaigns:

Together we met the moment, but ensuring we do so again will require careful debriefing, relationship building and accountability.
Future efforts will require much more creativity and vision.[7]p.50

The image below shows the platforms that Moonshot analyzed in their paper[7]:

Moonshot Team. "From Shitposting to Sedition..."

Finally, the quote below shows that Moonshot has special access to Instagram:

"This report analyses 5G-related searches across different regions of the UK to see the types of terms people were searching for, how this shifted over time, and how searches by region compared to real-world criminal damage against 5G infrastructure." [16]


Above all else, Moonshot and the CVE community are funded by the Department of Homeland Security

Government intervention created a market for information control and mass propaganda in 2016.


References

[1] The ARKA Journal. "The Agents in the False Ads".

[2] The ARKA Journal. "How Far-Leftism is Forced On Us".

[3] The ARKA Journal. "Facebook's Puppet Masters".

[4] The ARKA Journal. "Leftist Indoctrination on Facebook".

[5] Moonshot. "Facebook Redirect Programme: Moonshot Evaluation".

[6] Life After Hate. "How to Fight Fake News During Covid-19".

[7] Moonshot. "From Shitposting to Sedition." (2021).

[8] Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States." (June 2020).

[9] The ARKA Journal. "Progressive Movements – How Unscientific and Harmful Are They?" (2021).

[10] FBI. "Hate Crime". (2019).

[11] FBI. "Crime in the US". (2019).

[12] Statistical Atlas. "Race and Ethnicity".

[13] Institute for Economics and Peace. "Global Terrorism Index 2019 Measuring the Impact of Terrorism."

[14] The ARKA Journal. "The False Agenda".

[15] The ARKA Journal. "A Hidden War on Free Speech: Google's Jigsaw".

[16] Moonshot. "COVID-19: the #5GCoronavirus conspiracy on Instagram and Twitter".

[17] The ARKA Journal. "The World's Leading Brainwasher: Moonshot".

[18] Moonshot. "The Redirect Method". (2021).

[19] Axios. "Riots Cost Property Damage".

[20] Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Methodology."