Algorith​m​s, Authenticity, and Coordinated, Inauthentic Behavior: A Case Study in Caitlin Johnstone

A lot of conversations are going on online about the nature of censorship, social media, democracy and technology and yet not one of the commentaries made by people who’ve claimed victimization or decried others that I’ve read thus far has demonstrated adequate subject area knowledge about what’s been going on.

This article will review three concepts important to discussions about social media in relationship to algorithms, authenticity, and coordinated, inauthentic behavior; using Caitlin Johnstone’s Medium and Facebook account as a brief case study.

As of March 5th 2019, there are 394 million responses to the Google Query of “Facebook Algorithm”. And yet Abby Martin, Jimmy Dore, Lee Camp, Aaron Mate, Branko Marcetic, Chris Hedges – anyone that’s been contracted to work for Venezuelan and Russian state media outlets really – have a real hard time understanding what it is.

In the simplest terms as it applies to this case, algorithms a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations; they quantify lots of data according to specific terms for use of some sort. PCTR, or Interest, Post, Creator, Type, and Recency are just five of the myriad factors which fit into such problem-solving processes for social media platform. One of the most important of these qualities is Authenticity. Authenticity means that what data is being recorded and used in the algorithm stems from normal use. Coordinated inauthentic behavior is when groups of people seek to boost algorithmic ranking through planned actions – such as liking, sharing, commenting, watching, creating regional group pages, etc.

Given her claim that she is just a “rogue journalist” without any kind of institutional affiliation or disclosure of support from states such as Russia and Venezuela, it’s surprising that Caitlin Johnstone also has trouble understanding this.

Caitlin Johnstone’s journalism has lead to controversies in Arc Digital, Counterpoint, Mint Press News, Daily Kos, and other outlets. Sometimes described as a Cassandra Fairbanks-like content creator, a former TeleSUR contractor, I honestly haven’t read much Caitlin Johnstone. Like a TeleSUR contractor and Jacobin author Branko Marcetic, she is an Australian without demonstrable specialized subject area knowledge in the subjects she writes about – I’ll give her that the wacky-tacky Doomsday Prepper poetess schtick does provide some decent turns of phrase in what I did read, but as numerous others have stated the editorial standards are very low. .

While I haven’t read anything since last she popped up on my radar in connection to Orwellian Irony, an alert I have for a certain set of search terms came to my inbox and so I again found myself on her Medium page. One there I saw echoed the commentary framed in almost exactly the same way that I encountered in my research on TeleSUR, slightly different opinions but similarly based on significant omissions and distortions.

Shortly before my Medium account was taken down due to the coordinated activity of a group of Trans activists known as ACTUP, I posted a comment on this article that Caitlin Johnstone had published about Venezuela just a few minutes before. As she’d responded to the person who wrote two minutes before, I asked her a question.

Not only did I not get a response from the author, but I then watched in real time as a stream of comments that started to fill the response board and that lots of claps were being given to low-quality comments. My thoughtful request comment was literally drowned out by comments that looked suspicious. I decided to take a peak, and sure enough – they were! After looking at several of the accounts that had posted comments – it was clear that there were a number of sock puppet accounts heaping praise in the form of claps and engagement in the form of low-quality comments on the blog.

Like Darrel, the entirety of Joe Blow’s comments exist solely on the comments section of Caitlin Johnstone’s Medium page.

Like Darrel, these comments are small quotes, trite praises for “telling the truth” or comments only tangentially connected to the topic. It’s filler.

Unlike Darrel, Jow Blow has a profile image – however, it’s likely that this is not of him.

Unlike Darrel, Joe Blow may have a verifiable connection to a known disinformation account.

Why I decided to include two accounts that only commented on Caitlin Johnstone was to hint at it’s prevalence – there are a number of other such Medium accounts that seem to exist only to fluff Caitlin or one or two other authors, and as in doing research for another article I found another Joe Blow. In that other article, I show the behavioral connections between joeblowman and a larger network of right-wing fringe content sharers connected to Venezuela’s Kultural Marxism network. It’s hard to make the hard connections, but birds of a feather do flock together.

To be clear, I’m not saying that these Jow Blows are the same people – I’m just saying that given the lack of creativity of Venezuelan and Russian coordinated inauthentic networks it’s very, very likely that they are.

When Social Media platforms and Google respond to such coordinated inauthentic behaviors by penalizing those that have brazenly broken their terms and conditions, as it would seem that Caitlin Johnstone has done in this instance, it is not to silence speech – but to make the marketplace of ideas more democratic by having one’s numbers being honest and authentic.