Andre Damon’s reporting is good at placing pieces of information together to show a picture.
But since his reporting reflects fundamental misunderstandings of how the technology which underlies a variety of internet services functions, however, this puzzle is not held together because the pieces fit into a coherent narrative. It looks as it does because Andre Damon, who two decades ago would have been considered unqualified and unfit by any newsroom with rigorous professional standards to get published about the topics on which he speaks, has taken a hammer to the edges of curated facts in order to make an image that fits his prejudices.
While he claims to be informing his audience, readers of his articles and viewers of his live and video appearances wherein he speaks about issues related to social media, democracy, and censorship end up misinformed rather than informed.
Andre Damon is committed to propagating a false narrative via his readers at WSWS, but also via his role as the National Secretary (US) of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.
Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior: Fake Friends
Curiosity, not virtue-seeking, is the true root of journalism.
When TeleSUR went down the second time, I decided to investigate why and the answer is found in my article. Kultural Marxism: Digital Evidence of Venezuela’s Attempt to Influence American Elections. As I write about in more detail there, WSWS is one of several “alternative news” sites – such as TeleSUR, Venezeula Analysis, RT, Mint Press News, CounterPunch, GeoPolitics Alert, GlobalResearch.ca – that are part of a large network designed to artificially inflate their engagement to boost ranking on the Facebook algorithm.
I sent an email to Andre Damon sharing my findings with them and asking to speak with the person in charge of their digital marketing, but – they never responded and as you can see from the image above – the coordinated inauthentic behavior continued.
Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior: Fake Backlinks
The extent of black hat backlinking by WSWS is so extensive – you can use any limited use SEO tool to get a view of just how much junk links are posted on a variety of websites.
Unethical Journalism
Andre Damon claims in the article the Socialism and the struggle against Internet Censorship that an increase in visits to the website translates to a “growing influence.” This, however, is not a sign of influence and reflects that same kind of poor managerial thinking that lead Pablo Vivanco of TeleSUR English to think that “1000% increase in outreach” is a positive indicator! Sorry to put ya’lls ignorance on blast, guys, but in this digital, social media age so if you get rank for reasons that stank the stench has a tendency to get aired, no?
So what do I mean by increase in visists doesn’t translate to growing influence?
I could individually go to my own webpage and click refresh many times over.
I could hire a click farm to engage with my content.
I could contract a digital media specialist to build a number of aggregate blogs and fake facebook groups and accounts to increase my search term ranking for keywords – as I documented that WSWS and others did – to raise the number of hits to my website but depending on other factors this nor none of the above signifies a growing influence!
What would is the number of visitors that continued along their ideological “buyer’s journey”. In this case it is questions like the following which really matter: How many new people signed up to be new members? How many purchased literature from the website? How were bounce stats affected? What’s the average amount of time people stayed on the website?
The lack of reportage on this indicates that for all the crowing about censorship, the numbers of people that go from the consumer of WSWS reports to party members or even just a customer of the party is very low.
While knowing this is technically “specialized knowledge” it in no way was kept secret from Andre Damon either – it just required curiousity.
One could read the documentation provided by Google.
One could review the white papers and blogs of digital marketing companies.
One could learn about the issues one is talking about beforehand and thus prevent oneself from writing a series of articles that ought to be viewed now as genuinely embarrassing by the WSWS and cause for new editorial guidelines.
But Andre Damon hasn’t done any of this, and thus his reporting illustrates his lack of technical comprehension of basic concepts related to the digital world. The people that he interviews, additionally, all feed into this as well.
Let’s get specific.
In an article on the WSWS website titled “Facebook security officer- not all speech is created equal,” another allusion to George Orwell, we see another example of Andre Damon’s ignorance of basic tenants of journalism as well as the digital media infrastructure underpinning the internet webpages.
Why? Because with the slightest modicum of scrutiny the Orwellian analogy shows itself to be absurd.
There is a substantive difference between an article that includes an author name, that is published under the banner of a journalistic enterprise, that has been properly vetted by professional editors, that has references to sources included or made available to those that request it and an anonymous blog article posted on a recently purchased domain connected to an automated RSS feed that just posts links to networked news outlets.
Damon, in essence, is arguing against the kind of professional standards in journalism that would normally keep him from speaking about this issue in the first place.
This isn’t even the full extent of the disinformation Andre Damon shares, he also misinterprets other people’s statements to fit his worldview.
In Our Crime was Telling the Truth, when Damon states that “According to Stamos and Kristof, the major newspapers should have simply censored themselves and refused to cover WikiLeaks’ revelations.” he is again taking the quote out of context. Stamos is putting the responsibility for the issues being addressed onto the news outlets that published information in the first place. Stamos is saying that Facebook would have had to play content censor with a large number of major news outlets – which they didn’t want to do – were certain items of information to have been kept from the public. Thus we see hear that Andre Damon is crying censorship in a case wherein a spokesperson for Facebook is explicitly stating that the company did not see it as their responsibility to censor something.
Fundraising Fraud
What the above means in the context of WSWS’s fundraising efforts is that they are committing fraud.
Considering they are partners with TeleSUR – and that I’ve already shown how TeleSUR has committed Fundraising Fraud – this shouldn’t be that shocking. What is shocking is that not a single person decided to do any fact checking related to what was being said in advance.
The only reason that Chris Hedges, following the line of Andre Damon, is able to describe these websites as being targeted “because they find these critiques to be dangerous” is because he fundamentally doesn’t understand what’s going on in the back end.
When David North describes the problem of the Left: “The basic problem is not absence of courage, it’s not an absence of a desire to fight, it is an absence of understanding.” and states that, “Our challenge is to provide an increasingly insurgent world movement of the working class with the ideas and the program which it needs to understand the political situation which it confronts.” We see here an example of Orwellian irony because he clearly isn’t familiar with how technology operates!
Why Lie? To Scare Up Donations and to Increase the Paranoid Style in American Politics
One issue with this type of false news reporting is that it perpetuates a narrative based on ignorance that fits into the geopolitical goals of foreign nationals – specifically Venezuela and Russia.
If people are afraid over things they shouldn’t be and they believe that unconstitutional things are happening when they aren’t it exacerbates perceptions of political polarization and loss of confidence in the government. Which is not to say that news which leads to that *should* be censored, but that fake conspiracies like the one which WSWS, Andre Damon, Chris Hedges, David North and all of the other members of this network should not be able to be classified as news on social media.
If they can’t make the effort to inform themselves before they seek to inform others; if they can’t make the effort to fact check themselves after someone like myself has contacted them; if they raise money for a fraudulent basis that’s connected to these networks – these people aren’t journalists, but foreign propagandists.