Lax Ethica

 
A Historical Account, Data Analysis, Network Ethnography & Theoretic Exegesis
that
Demonstrates
Dr. Philip N. Howard  
– Director of the Oxford Internet Institute –
Disseminates Disinformation
to Further the Ambitions of the Bolivarian Socialist Movement
and
Demonstrates his Participation in
The Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH),
a Counter-Intelligence Operation
Developed and Managed by the Venezuelan and Cuban Intelligence Services

Abstract:

This article presents the case that Dr. Philip N. Howard has a history of fundamentally fraudulent research designed to politically polarize, misinform and misdirect his audience.

After providing an account of how the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Philip N. Howard, violated the spirit and letter of the American Sociological Associations code of professional ethics by: (1) refusing to update self-published research (2) by publishing and promoting articles from multiple investigations whose research design was without merit (3) providing testimony to government bodies whose effect was to misdirect or misinform.

Content analysis based on the messaging effects of these publications leads to a hypothesis that Philip N. Howard is a Socialist – a close reading of Philip N. Howard’s academic work and network ethnography proves that this is true and, furthermore, that he is likely a member of a trans-national network of alter-globalization academics promoted by the Hugo Chavez founded, Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence Services’ managed “Networks of Intellectuals”. 

Keywords: Disinformation, Political Manipulation, Fraud, Subversive Academic Networks, Sao Paulo Forum 

***

After Dr. Philip N. Howard and I were both quoted in the New York Times about Facebook’s participation in the Social Science One investigation into Social Media and Democracy, I decided to visit the website of the Oxford’s Internet Institute (OII) and review their publications. Upon reading The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulationwhich Howard co-authored with Samantha Bradshaw I noticed four significant errors in their findings – described below – based on my investigation of Venezuela’s social media behavior over the past two years in partnership with Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana (UPB).

As this report was self-published, correctable in under five minutes with Adobe Acrobat Pro and as according to the American Sociological Association’s Code of Ethics Section 12.4 Subsection E it is considered best practice to update research in light of new data I sent OII an email with notification of their errors along with appropriate documentation on September 29^th– three days after the Inventory’s publication.

My initial contact was ignored, but after repeated follow ups I received a response, briefly corresponded with Dr. Howard and was then informed that he would not update the document, not answer questions I had casting doubt on his research methodology, and was informed that he would not solicit UPB’s expert opinion for their 2020 Inventory and that he was instructing his subordinates at the OII to ignore all future requests from me. I was shocked by such behavior.

At first I graciously believed this was a result of mere narcissistic negligence – which is random in its effect. But given that this was verbatim the same behavior I’d witnessed when asking certain questions of American media producers that were currently or previously had worked for Venezuela’s state media company I was suspicions.

After investigating Dr. Philip N. Howard’s academic work, press mentions, and professional associations I now understand the reason he wanted to foreclose the inclusion of counterfactual data to his claims is likely a result of his Socialist political convictions manifesting in a desire to misdirect attention from Venezuela’s online and in-real-life political propaganda activities and – most especially – the Leon Trotsky-inspired “network of networks” founded by Hugo Chavez in 2005 to help develop a new Socialist Internationale by providing assistance, amongst other means, to subversive professors – a policy which Venezuela’s ally Cuba has engaged in since 1963.

First I’ll illustrate Dr. Howard’s public history of correcting trivial research errors.

After this I document several significant errors found in his research whose baseless findings have made their way into the press. After this trend is established, I examine Dr. Howard’s testimony to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Service to show his engagement in misdirection and that the submission of his expert opinion the U.K. Parliament was  disinformation.

Content analysis is then used to illustrate that the general thrust of Dr. Howard’s research project has been to mirror the political positions of Socialist and Communist Parties associated with the Alter-Globalization/International Socialism Project mentioned above.

Following this I document the evidence showing Dr. Philip Howard’s engagement with Communist and Communist-sympathizing actors and his use of Marxian theoretical frameworks within his published research. In close, I demonstrate what appears to be the effects of participation in the Cuban and Venezuelan Government sponsored Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity and summarize the results of this exercise in ethnographic and process mapping.

 Philip N. Howard’s History of Correcting and Ignoring Research Errors

To err is human, to correct mistakes is divine – so when Philip N. Howard amends his article Zuckerberg Goes to Russia as the Global Network Initiative Turns 4 on the blog for Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policyhe is aligning himself with best academic practices. The same is true for the three articles (1– 2– 3) of Philip N. Howard has posted on the Pacific Standard website, and the error he describes in a Tweet on December 9^th, 2018. And yet there exists several other research articles and testaments of his which remain unexpiated and that, when placed together indicate his research project’s alignment with the Bolivarian goals.

Case Study: Fake Research Contra Donald Trump 

Mother Jones published an article entitled Trump Supporters Spread the Majority of Phony News on Social Media based on Philip Howard’s research, as did several other news outlets.

In an Opinion article by Erik Wemple for The Washington Post titled Study bashes Trumpites for promoting ‘junk’ news. But what’s that?, Erik Wemple also points out an issue related to categorization which invalidated Philip N. Howard’s research findings.

Elizabeth Harrington at The Washington Free Beacon in an article titled The Oxford Study Saying Trump Supporters Share More Fake News Is Fake Newspoints out a second categorization error that complicates, if not nullifies, the findings of Philip N. Howard’s study.

Both of these journalists, however, overlooked two even larger issues that categorically invalidates the study that this Mother Jones article was based on.

(1) During the period under Oxford’s investigation SparkToro estimated at least 61% of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers were false accounts – which nowhere within the methodology is it stated that this was even accounted for.

(2) According to research from the University of Cambridge, bots retweet much more content than do real humans. Again – nowhere within the methodology is it stated that this was accounted for.

(3) According the findings section of the report a variant of the k-core reduction was used to reduce the data-set to 13,477 users, yet on page 6 of the online supplement it states that the k-core consisted of 12,413 users. Questions about this discrepancy sent to the Oxford Internet Institute went unanswered.

In other words, ironically enough, the researcher who claims to be the authority on “exposing the role of bots and trolls” doesn’t even account for the fact that bots were producing the majority of the content analyzed in his own dataset.

That such an research was published at all ought to surprise anyone familiar with the Twitter ecosystem. Indeed Philip N. Howard seems to admit that this line of research was fundamentally erroneous in a Tweet on February 1^st– four days before Mother Jones and several other outlets announced to the world that Donald Trump fake-news sharing fools.

And yet despite these public criticisms and the larger research design flaws – the article remain published and the outlets which cover it remain uncorrected.

Case Study: Fake Research Contra Jair Bolsonaro

WhatsApp fake news during Brazil election ‘favoured Bolsonaro’ was published in The Guardian and features original research by Daniel Avelarwhich features a quote by former Oxford Internet Institute researcher Caio Machado.

Machado’s own research was covered in the New York Time article Disinformation Spreads on WhatsApp Ahead of Brazilian Election and was based on one of two research articles in which he is listed as the coauthor of with Philip N. Howard:  A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp groups with a focus on the Brazilian Presidential Electionsand News and Political Information Consumption in Brazil: Mapping the First Round of the 2018 Brazilian Presidential Election on Twitter.

After reading the two articles published by OII, I sent a request for more information about the WhatsApp investigation on November 25^th, as I has no interest in the Twitter study as I population studies on that platform are essentially invalid, in contrast to what OII claims – which will be discussed later.

The questions that I asked OII were as follows:

• Are the privatized data-set available for researchers to review?
• Is there a publicly available data repository for review by researchers that contains JUST the 99,988 media files, the 50,795 Original URLS, the 38,800 coded links or even just 200 coded images/videos?
• Since URLs were coded on a domain and sub domain level, is there a codebook available to review that shows the classification of domains?
• In the sampling and methods section, it’s stated that 200 images/videos were randomly chosen for coding but there the method for randomization is not described.

All these questions stem from a desire to see if their findings could be duplicated. This is important as replicability is a key component of Science, and the inability to do this in the materials science, data science and social sciences has caused some to describe the current capacity of research teams not to repeat experiments and get the same findings of others as a replicability crisis.

That I received no response from OII is suspicious enough in itself, however after doing cursory research into Caio Machado it’s all the more so. Sao Paulo, Brazil – where Machado went to law school – has long been a center of socialist activity. Indeed it hosted the first iteration of a pan-Latin American conference of social movements, Communist and Socialist parties conceived of by Fidel Castro and Lula Brazil to help steer pan-Latin American integration called the Sao Paulo Forum. By itself Caio Machado having gone to law school in Sao Paulo, Brazil means nothing – but in light of the fact that he retweeted content from an account claiming to be the embodiment of the spirit of Communist Cultural Critic Mark Fisher and that he has – it appears – attended a lecture featuring Liberation Theologist Enrique Dussel it appears that there could be a possibility for unreported bias. I emailed Caio Machado, who responded to my introduction, but then decided not to respond to my question about the nature of his relationship to Liberation Theologist Enrique Dussel – pictured above receiving an award from Hugo Chavez from the magazine Humanidad en Red no 0– the magazine of the Red de Intelectuals y Artistas en Defensa de la Humanidad (REDH).

It’s possible that I’m incorrect in my assessment that the WhatsApp research that Oxford Internet Institute published is indeed valid – however given the omissions from their methodological description, their unwillingness to answer basic research design questions, to share data and that one of their researchers to answer a question related to a potential conflict of interest I’m highly suspicions of its legitimacy in light of all of the other issues related to Philip N Howard’s research. 

Case Study: Fake Research Pro Venezuela

Philip N. Howard’s research falsely claims that Venezuela’s propaganda activities are far less active and complex then they actually are. Here are, in short, the sections that they get wrong.

Organizational Form and Preference:

The number of citizens and influencers listed on OII’s report is listed as blank – as if no one was engaged in propaganda on behalf of the Venezuelan government. However ABC International has published reports about citizens receiving money for citizen engagements on social media and it’s well known that Danny Glover, Oliver Stone and Roger Waters – and others – have received all gifts and payment for engaging in propaganda on Venezuela’s behalf.

Messaging and Valence:

TeleSUR’s official page shares memes which encourage violence against fascists (a substitute for American politicians, law enforcement, and those whose policies don’t align with Venezuela’s goals). A variety of Jewish groups have published about TeleSUR’s antisemitism and that of their contractors while Venezuela’s other government’s other pages share content meant to appeal to anti-Semites, or that present false, politically polarizing quotes from politicians, and deepfake nudes and images meant to drive hatred towards police.

Communication Strategies:

The OII reports that Venezuela isn’t using mass reporting to take down undesirable content. I provided them with a case study wherein that happened to me for my publications on these topics.

The OII report states that Venezuela isn’t using data driven strategies, however even if one hasn’t engaged in the research or collected data from interviews as UPB has – it’s an on its face absurd proposition that a media network with, which OII admits, multiple centers of activity and its own news network wouldn’t use data to monitor and manage their efforts.

Harassment and Threats of Violence:

While this is a category not included in Oxford’s report, thus something that I did not submit evidence of, had it been included I would have provided examples of digital harassment and threats of violence against me.

Philip N. Howard’s Political Testimony & Lax Ethica

Besides research with design flaws that renders its conclusions invalid, Philip N. Howard has also provided testimony to the British Crown and the United States Senate Intelligence Committee that had the effect of misdirecting politicians from multi-generational irregular, information warfare campaigns to focus exclusively on online activity equivalent with, more or less, to targeted spam campaigns.

Philip N. Howard’s False Research Attempts to Discredit the Brexit Results

In the article Brexit: Leave ‘very likely’ won EU referendum due to illegal overspending, says Oxford professor’s evidence to High Court Philip N. Howard is quoted therein saying:

“Given the scale of the online advertising achieved with the excess spending, combined with conservative estimates on voter modelling, I estimate that Vote Leave converted the voting intentions of over 800,000 voters in the final days of the campaign as a result of the overspend.”

This statement was extracted from a report that he presented to the High Court of Justice, Queens’s Bench Division titled: Impact of Unlawful Overspending on Digital Advertising by Vote Leave and BeLeave campaigns in the 2016 EU Referendum, which can be viewed by clicking the title.

A website called Order-Order published critical commentary on Philip N. Howard’s findings linked to two Twitter accounts of professionals in the field of statistics and data-journalism that debunked Howard’s testimony.

John Burn-Murdoch, a data-visualization journalist for The Financial Times has a Twitter thread on Philip N. Howard’s poor research methodology.

Anthony B. Masters of the Royal Statistical Society also has a Twitter thread on Philip N. Howard’s poor research methodology.

Their arguments against Philip N. Howard’s research findings are as follows:

• The base is too high: the entire electorate was 46.5m.His basic argument is: 80m Facebook users saw the ads
• 10% click-through rate is much higher than is typically found for Facebook display advertising. Wordstream (US)says less than 1% — that may be based on impressions, not users. Average conversion is 9.2%, but politics is not a standard industry.
• Howard’s section on conversion says that 10% click through, 10% believe and “a further 10% of that number can then be expected to do something.” This step is merged or omitted in the calculation.
• Finally, the citation given is Howard’s own bookNew Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen says: “Banner ads on political topics generally had a 1 percent click-through rate”. This means that the citation contradicts the statement given in the Court submission.

In other words what Philip N. Howard submitted fundamentally flawed and invalid data to the politicians deciding legal issues related to Brexit.

Philip N. Howard Misleads and Misdirects the Senate Intelligence Committee

On August 1^stof 2018, Philip N. Howard presented testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In his comments to the panel Philip N. Howard states that “The time for industry self-regulation has passed.” a position which echoes his 2014 editorials for the nationalization of Facebook.

At 1 hour, 19 minutes and 15 seconds into the hearing Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri asks Philip N. Howard “Of the other countries you’ve looked at who should we [the political body in charge of making decisions related to politics] be looking at after Russia that are likely impacting our [American] daily conversation.

Philip N. Howard responds: “Well in our research we look at Turkey, China, Hungary and Iran.”

This is a noteworthy in that it is a non-answer to the question – the way it’s framed Philip N. Howard is merely stating countries that the Oxford Internet Institute has investigated.

Senator Blunt, picking up on this, moves on to another interlocutor.

At 1 hour, 34 minutes and 28 seconds, Senator Joe Manchin again brings up the question asks Philip N Howard directly:

• Which country poses the greatest threat to our democracy using social media platforms?
• Which countries are making strides to do the same?

Philip N. Howard, again, does not answer the question. Instead he engages in another meandering digression before being Senator Joe Manchin gets him back on topic – at which point Philip N. Howard says – China has the greatest capacity. This, again, is not the question asked of him and, tellingly, despite having done all of this research at no point does he provide any explanation as to what makes one country more of a threat then another.

There are many potential reasons why Howard could have had such difficulty in answering a direct question, however the real reason was he wanted to waste the time of the Senators present and misdirect attention from the greater threat to American democracy – the 17 year long quantitative political programto develop a trans-national, socialist-oriented political party in the United States by Venezuela and Cuba in coordination with the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH) that help steer it’s development by acting as promoters, authorities and gatekeepers – the Network which Philip N. Howard is himself a part of – as well as their witting or unwitting assistants and financiers.

I’ll now explain first how the above-analyzed social science research findings are in fact anti-Truth, pro-Socialist propaganda and then demonstrate how Philip N. Howard’s career trajectory and academic writing demonstrates his communist political commitments and connections to REDH.

Oxford Internet Institute Research Mirrors Socialist Party Positions

The above graphic organizer shows a side-by-side comparison of research published by the Oxford Internet Institute with Philip N. Howard as the Primary Investigator and the political positions promoted by the Socialist Worker Party (U.K), the Democratic Socialists of America, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA) and the Brazilian Workers Party (Brazil). Content analysis shows that both the Oxford Internet Institute under Philip N. Howard’s direction and the Socialist parties networked with Venezuela are promoting electoral invalidation of Brexit as well as the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro. I’ve already covered the latter two investigations, and will cover the issue of Brexit after the following two oversvations.

While in these particular articles here neither Oxford or the socialist parties explicitly reference each the other – it is interesting to note is that in the article Bot Use in the Presidential Election that the U.S. Marxist – Leninist Organization quotes Howard and the Oxford Internet Institute extensively.

Also worthy of note is that in the top right image which has the “Another Europe is Possible” banner that this has been a Socialist Worker organizing slogan since at least 2004, as evident from these Indymedia protest photos.

Given all this, and what will subsequentially be depicted, we can correct President Rodrigo Duterte’s claim that Oxford is for “stupid people”– with Oxford is for Cunning Crypto-Communist Professors.

Who Funds Philip N. Howard at Oxford?

Philip N. Howard’s funding comes from pro-Bolivarian Revolution sources.

The four institutional supporters for Oxford Internet Institute’s 2019 Inventory are the European Research Council, Hewlette Foundation, Luminate and the Adessium Foundation. Ascribing broad intentions to large funding councils can be highly problematic so I’ll focus on two facts that relate to the factual constellation developed herein.

Luminate is a subsection of the Pierre Omidyar Foundation, which also funds the strongly left-biased news-outlet The Intercept.  The founder of The Intercept, Glen Greenwald, has documented connections to Trevor Fitzgibbon – who Venezuela has used for Public Relations – since at least 2009 when both participated in developing the second edition of the Voices of a People’s History of the United States Project. Notably Zinn is listed as one of the strategy developers for the REDH project. Fitzgibbon – who did PR for Julian Assange before and after he was granted Ecuadorian citizenship by President Rafael Correa, one a reliable ally of the Bolivarian project – also helped Greenwald get his big break by doing PR for Edward Snowden and arranging his safe travels to Russia.

 Another project that the European Research Council funded is titled A Global Movement for Environmental Justice: The EJAtlas.

The ETJAtlas is large, searchable data base of environmental conflict. According to the authors, it is:

“informed, based on and co-designed together with global environmental justice organizations; many of which had been building their own repositories of knowledge on such ecological conflicts over the past 30 years in some cases. These include the Observatory of mining conflicts of Latin America (OCMAL), Oilwatch, World Rainforest Movement, FIOCRUZ and the Brazilian network of Environmental Justice; GAIA; and the Centro di Documentazione sui Conflitti Ambientali (CDCA), as well as other sourcewe can say that a further aim of the EJAtlas is to support and contribute to the cohesiveness and self-awareness of an emerging globalizing movement for environmental justice (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016). An exercise that falls under what the historian Vijay Prashad describes as a socialist writing project — one intended to produce a confident community of struggle and to empower opposition to the status quo through the sharing of narratives that highlight the agency of those struggling to create better worlds.”

The project itself is fascinating en toto, but in relation to discussion I want to focus solely on three things.

First is the project’s avowedly socialist orientation.

Second is the use of Manuel Castells as an orienting figure – the introductory sentence invokes his scholarship with the statement: “The environmental movement may be “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997: 67), representing for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period.”

And third that of the authors is Joan Martinez-Alier – a political ecologist who’s given many speeches for the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, blogged for Venezuela’s Chavista website Apporea, and wrote in his report The Environmentalism of the Poor submitted for readership by U.N. that “Eco-Zapatism was overdue in Mexico”. In an article featured on the website of Venezuelan state media outlet TeleSUR, Joan Martinez-Alier’s work forms the basis for numerous ecological movements and the claims made by Delcy Rodriguez, Vice President of Venezuela, that the United States must abide by the Paris Climate Agreement.

Given that Philip N. Howard has written a book on Manuel Castells, this is appropriate theme on which to begin development.

Philip N Howard’s Intellectual and Professional Trajectory

Engagement with The Zapatista Uprising

In Pax Technica Philip N. Howard describes in brief his journey to the heart of a Marxist insurgency.

“In 1995 I traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, to meet with the Zapatista insurgents. I wanted to learn about their motivations and their struggle, and to understand why they were having such an unusual impact on international politics.”

Why did he go there?

“My first investigations took me to Chiapas to meet with the Zapatistas and learn about their internet strategies in 1994.”

While he describes little about his Mexico experiences in Pax Technica, he later wrote an article with Thomas Homer-Dixon that is, in short, a justification of the Marxist revolutionary movement. He also gives an interpretation of the events there that are quite at odds with the wider literature on the Zapatistas. He says, again in Pax Technica, that:

“The stories of the Zapatistas and the Arab Spring are not about nationalist fervor inspiring political revolution. They are not about religious fundamentalism. These movements were not particularly Marxist, Maoist, or populist. They had leaders, but employed comparatively flat organizations of informal teams…”

This is an unusual claims as it is so at odds with the specialist literature on the subject. Reading The Communist Roots of Zapatismo and the Zapatista Uprisingby Christopher Gunderson ,The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexicoby Rand, Zapatista: Reinventing Revolution in MexicobyLuis Lorenzano or Todd Wolfson’s From the Zapatistas to Indymediayou’d learn that“Zapatismo emerged dialectically, through a series of confrontations, and was/is a fluid response to material conditions of struggle in Mexico” which originated from a group of six urban openly Marxist revolutionaries, including the now famous spokesperson for the organization Subcomandante Marcos, whose real name is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicenteand who was a professor in the Sciences and Art for Design Department at UAM that praises Fidel Castroand that assigned his students a reading list that included Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Mao Tse-tung. You’d learn that in the 1980s he and his fellow cadre-members moved into the mountains of Chiapas to organize the local Mayan community with the goal of leading an armed uprising that would cause the country to rally to their side so they capture state power.

So why does Howard say that the Zapatistas are not Communists given all this and that the 23 de Enero community in Caracas – the neighborhood that George Ciccariello-Maher claims is the “most radical” –includes an EZLN flag in their movement of movements? Why does Howard make this claim when, as you can see on the bottom right, that Subcomandante Marcos uses Communist icons on flags when he gives public speeches?

I couldn’t say for sure, but all things considered I’d speculate it’s to create the perception of distance from these Marxist revolutionaries. Being an openly communist professor can lead one to increased vigilance being conferred upon their academic work in light of ethical Professional Codes of Ethics and Standards. After all – those who want to overturn all existent rules and laws to suit their whims and those of their comrades are likely to do so in their intellectual work as well. Because of this much of the organizing occurs through email lists – a la the Zapatistas, Social Forum, and IndyMedia – and partnership within the “network of networks” isn’t openly avowed but understood through reference to common symbols, ideas, and connection to other comrade professors.

Indymedia Centers

Emerging in part from the intermingling of myriad NGO activists and academics via encounters curated by the Zapatistas, the Independent Media Centers were born just before the Battle in Seattle. Conceived of as a combination between Alternative Press and vector of cyber-subversion antagonistic to the capitalist paradigm – police record attest to its success toward those ends.

Josh Wolf, a contributor to Indymedia, was jailed for 11 monthsfor refusing to turn over unedited video footage connected to an arson case. An Indymedia user was arrested for leaving a comment implying he was going harass a judge who’d just sent animal rights activists to jail after his personal information was posted on Indymedia. The German government shut down the Indymedia website and banned it as an extremist organization. Police in Bristol raided Indymedia and forced it to close down, as did the police in Greece for the Athens Indymedia.

According to Joshua D. Atkinson in Alternative Media and Politics of Resistance: A Communication Perspective this is not to be considered exceptional but the rule as:

“Past research has demonstrated that Indymedia.org, The Nation and a variety of zines sere as primary sources for information about resistance and social justice for Radical Participatory activities (e.g., Armstrong, 1982; Atkinson & Dougherty, 2006; Atton 2002a; 20040 Downing 2003a; 2003b). These are not the only alternative media titles used by Radical Participatory activists as other titles, like the anarchist news website Inforshop.org, have emerged from additional research projects (e.g., Atton, 2003).”

In New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen Philip N. Howard describes his visiting the headquarters of these organizations more than once:

“Near the convention, Francie is getting ready at the Independent Media Center (IMC). She is twenty-three, petite, and dressed in black and green army fatigues bought at a secondhand store. Francie is angry at her country, disgusted by its blind faith in an environmentally unsustainable economy. Francie believes in a carbon tax that would discourage polluters and create a revenue stream for research into green technologies. She doesn’t believe that the mainstream media do justice to environmental issues, so she has volunteered with the IMC…”

While there is nothing wrong with this by itself, put into the evidentiary constellation that this article is develops this becomes another indicator – weak by itself but more significant in light of everything else – of Philip N. Howard’s in-group membership with a covert, coordinated, subversive network.

The Thought of the Marxist Manuel Castells

In the book Castells and the Media: Theory and Media Philip N. Howard claims that the person in the title, Manuel Castells is “one of the most important contemporary social scientists.” More than that, per Howard’s opening dedication, he is “inspiring”.

As a public intellectual with almost 50 years of teaching and publishing behind him so there is a lot one could say about his work.

For our purposes, I only have two issues to focus on:

• The general orientation of Castells’ research
• The networks in which Castells operates

The first point is quickly answered: Castells’ is a Marxist. In “Networks in Manuel Castells’ Theory of the Network Society” Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko argues that “‘network’ in Castells’ social theory is not an analytical concept but rather a powerful metaphor that served to capture his idea of the new social morphology of late capitalism.” His career began as a Marxist analyst of the city and as technology developed, he incorporated these new forms of discourse into his work to give the appearance of novelty to his analysis.

As for the networks in which Manuel Castells engages with, he is a political theorist associated with the Sao Paulo Forum, the Association for Progressive Communications and CLACSO– a social sciences organization whose conferences have previously been promoted and covered by Venezuela’s state media. He’s also published open letters via Cuba’s Network in Defense of Humanity.

Taking online graduate level courses with Manuel Castells and a number of other leftist activists and intellectuals such as Juan Carlos Monedero and Pablo Iglesias – two of the founders of Spain’s PODEMOS Party that received over 8.8 million Euros in funding from the governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro Moros for consulting and production work – is possible via CLACSO’s online platform.

Their co-appearances at CLACSO events isn’t the only time that the Director of TeleSUR, Patricia Villegas, and Manuel Castells have had the opportunity to network. They both also gave presentations at the X Encuentro Internacional de Investigadores y Estudiosos de la Información y la Comunicación (ICOM) in Havana, Cuba 2019.

Castells has also been featured in El Telegrafo, an Ecuadorian newspaper, and cited by its director Orlando Perez, who transitioned to becoming an executive at TeleSUR English following the discovery of irregularities during his tenure at El Telegrafo and the departure of his patron, ex-President Rafael Correa due to anti-corruption legal proceedings.

The Orinoco Tribute, a media outlet managed by the former consul general of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Chicago, Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza, – the same Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza who accepted pledges from members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization to support the Bolivarian Revolution– also publishes calls to study the work of Manuel Castells.

Given all this and Manuel Castells long and intimate association with Uruguay’s FrenteAmplista network, it helps explain why this country was not included within Oxford Internet Institute’s 2019 Global Disinformation Inventory.

The Center for Communication and Civic Engagement & Lance Bennett

According to Philip N. Howard’s CV, when he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication doing research on electoral issuesat the University of Washington the directorof the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, Lance Bennet, was also on the planning committee for the Northwest Social Forum. The video promoting it, from which the above screenshot comes, is quaint given its low production quality and deceptive given the fact that shorty before the launch of this Movement of Movements in Caracas Hugo Chavez announced at the World Forum of Intellectuals and Artiststhat he would be using the billions of dollars of the oil revenues the governments received to fund a “network of networks”.

Reading the book that Philip N. Howard edited with Andrew Chadwick, Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics,you would learn that had the event not been cancelled it would have been the second Social Forum in the U.S. following the Boston Social Forum– an event extensively promoted by the Venezuela Information Officeand attended, like the aforementioned Caracas event, by Danny Glover.

While it’s interesting to note that when Lance Bennett arrived at Yalefor graduate school it was at a time when Black Panther Party activism was high and talk of general strike was in the air – this says nothing per se about the nature of Bennet’s academics. It is, however, noteworthy to point out that Omar González, Cuba’s former Vice-Minister of Culture, is someone that thinks Lance Bennet’s works is important and a useful theoretical basis for Communist Party praxis.

George Soros’s Central European University

From 2013-2015 Philip N. Howard was the founding Professor for the School of Public Policy and the Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University – which was founded and funded by George Soros. George Soros though that this particular department was so worthy that he even recorded a minute long promotional video for the Public Policy Department. My evocation of Soros here is meant to highlight only three points:

• in 2017 the Hungarian Parliament adopted amendments to the country’s 2011 Act CCIV on National Higher Education which lead to the University at the end of the next year. The rationale given by Zoltan Balog was due to “foreign policy priorities and National security considerations”.
• The choice of icons used in the protests by CEU students when protesting that act.
• For reasons that will become clearer later, that it’s documented that George Soros’ Open Society Initiative provided at least $33 million dollars to activists in Ferguson, Missouri.

The importance of the first one will become apparent in the section below titled “Philip N. Howard’s Covert Support of Arab and US Communist Insurrections”. The importance of the second point will be made apparent by referencing the header images – many of which include the raised fist symbols used by those associated with the Bolivarian Socialist Movement. The third point will come into play in light of the section “Philip N. Howard supports Black Lives Matter-related Intellectuals”.

Discourse with Rebecca MacKinnon

One of the “campaigners for internet freedom” that Philip N. Howard highlights and praises in Pax Technica is Rebecca MacKinnon.

A member and director of a number of advocacy groups that educate, agitate and organize under the banner of human rights not codified in U.S. or international law. The U.S. State Department recently formed an Unalienable Rights Commission to act as a counterbalance to the explosive growth of such organizations, and a cursory review of Rebecca MacKinnon’s presentations demonstrate that she is exemplary of those activists that mobilizes misunderstandings of law and human rights discourse for dubious or malignant purposes.

As is evidenced from the above, Rebecca MacKinnon’s book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedomuses classic socialist iconography. Lest I be deemed guilty of merely judging a book by its cover, it is also worth pointing out that part five of the book is titled “What is to be Done?” – an allusion to the Vladimir Illich Lenin book with the same title.

That Rebecca MacKinnon makes this obvious reference to Lenin is interesting for a number of  reasons. For the purposes of brevity I’ll limit my comments to calling attention to the fact that in What is to be Done? Lenin diverges from the classical Marxian conception of seizure of state power and describes the need for a covert, professional revolutionary cadre – a Vanguard Party.

In his article Lenin and the Concept of the Professional Revolutionary, published in the History of Political Thought, Robert Mayer explicates that while this vanguard party – what Gramsci referred to as the Modern Prince – is Lenin’s main concerns there is another intermediary social group between the Party and the Masses. These are the activists, artists, and intellectuals that are covertly connected to or loosely associated with the party and are either consciously subservient or are generally deferential to it – a Network.

In short, to put Lenin’s dual-power conception of politics in general terms – the Vanguard Party is the Revolutionary-Government-In-Waiting, and the Network is their steering committee.

Within this context, this makes a several facts pulled from Rebecca MacKinnon’s academic/activist biography take on an interesting light – and thus Philip N. Howard’s citation of her.

(1) The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) summit that Philip N. Howard describes Rebecca MacKinnon as speaking refers to in the above quote was targeted for institutional capture by the European Social Forum, the European partner of the Sao Paulo Forum – an organization founded by Cuba’s Communist Party and Brazil’s Workers party and now supported by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

While there is no online list of members or supporters of the now defunct European Social Forum, content analysis of Rebecca MacKinnon’s messaging, her being on the Advisory Board of organizations whose members include those associated with the Sao Paulo Forums and coverage of her book in journals about leftist social movements – provides provisional proof that she was a part of this cadre.

(2) Rebecca MacKinnon worked at CNN at the same time as Andres Izarra – Venezuela’s former Minister of Communication and Information and the ex-president of TeleSUR. Shortly after Izarra left, so too did she. I don’t know if the two of them ever did interact

(3) Rebecca MacKinnon gave a presentation at RightsCon in Manila in 2015 and FitzGibbon Media, Venezuela’s public relations firm, was also present there. 

(4) Rebecca MacKinnon’s partner in the founding of Global Voices– a journalistic organization that would later play a minor role, along with Julian Assange of Wikileaks, in the Arab Spring – was Ethan Zuckerman and he too had a run in with Andres Izarra. In a blog post entitled Opening Sessions at the Aljazeera Forum, Ethan Zuckerman describes attending an Al Jazeera conference where Izarra was on a panel.

(5) Ethan Zuckerman – who is known to Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party – has written a number of quantitative media analysis articles about the Ferguson, Missouri political unrest that was promoted by George Soros, Venezuela’s media contractorsRebel Diaz, Venezuela’s public relations firm FitzGibbon Media, Venezuela’s political allies Code Pink – as evidenced via the documentary Whose Streets?and Danny Glover. In addition to writings on his blog, in a chapter of the book Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice Ethan Zuckerman also describes how Global Voices helped promote the activity there in the media.

 Marek Toszynski

Another internet activist/organization that Philip N. Howard believes deserving of praise is Marek Toszynski, one of the founders of Tactical Tech.

In addition to being a member of this democracy advocacy NGO, Marek is also a writer for the New Internationalist– a “new left” periodical that describes advocating for Venezuela in their 2019 annual reportand, as is evident from the above magazine cover, uses variations of the Sao Paulo Forum slogan “Another World is Possible” as an orientation point for their editorial vision.

I’ll forego similar analysis as I did to the above, but as I believe it’s noteworthy I will say that it’s deserving of being pointed out that the second co-founder of Tactical Tech is an artist whose recent exhibition could perhaps be described as AgitProp art against Facebook, Stephanie Hankey, and that she is also an academic working at Oxford’s Internet Institute.

What Does Philip N. Howard Promote?

Philip N. Howard supports the de-platforming of Steve Bannon.

While looking through Philip N. Howard’s Twitter account I noticed that he expressed disdain at Steve Bannon addressing the Oxford Union.

More than expressing some kind of rationale with his positions, he breaks form from the polite Canadian stereotype and says that it’s a mistake to allow him on the “platform” as he “chokes public discourse” – and is a “poison.”

This is noteworthy for two reasons.

Rather than saying that Steve Bannon “shouldn’t be allowed an audience” or “a soap box to stand on” or some other variation of the phrases – Philip N. Howard chooses a term that has been widely adopted by Socialist parties and Antifa activists: platform.

While Philip N. Howard doesn’t out and out call Steve Bannon a fascist – his message is the same as that worded by the Communist Party of Canada and the Hugo Chavez Front of Toronto – the city and country where Philip N. Howard received his Bachelor of Arts degree.

Avowed socialist Owen Jones tweeted a similar stance against Bannon and the Canary, a recently founded “social justice” oriented UK news outlet that has published an article about how sad it is that propaganda funded by Venezuela was banned from YouTube and that also promotes Philip N. Howard’s research, also published an article claiming that Bannon is a fascist and thus does not deserve the right to speak at Oxford.

None of this reflects directly upon Philip N. Howard’s scholarship – but the affinities are worthy of being pointed out. 

Philip N. Howard’s Covert Support of Arab and US Communist Insurrections

In the article A State Department 2.0 Response to the Arab Spring Philip N. Howard capitalized on the media’s general interest and specialist ignorance to advocate for State Department policy positions that sought to create sympathies for those engaged in the effort to overthrow the Egyptian government. In his own words he writes:

“We need the State Department to do some 21st century thinking.  Egypt’s elites are defecting, and taking their networks of support away from Mubarak. The protests in Egypt are about social networks that are beyond Mubarak’s reach.  Don’t worry about who is next, worry about which networks need recognition, support, and encouragement. The State Department 2.0 strategy needs to bet on networks of civil society participants in Tunis, Cairo, and the other regional capitals now in crisis. Think in terms of networks, not individual power brokers and traditional political actors. Even the Muslim Brotherhood may be best thought of as a network organization…”

Putting aside the issues of the demands and their legitimacy given by the aggrieved it’s worth point out that nowhere within this article does Howard identify any of the actual actors involved. “The network” as an ideal is all that’s referred to and only by reading other sources, such as the article The Revolutionary Socialists in Post-‘Arab Spring’ Egypt does one learn that many of those initial calls put out to engage in protest were those of Socialists. Ahmed Salah, the “mastermind of the revolution” and the son of a Socialist Labor Party activist is not mentioned at all.

There is, similarly no mention of the role of Julian Assange. Considering groups such as Amnesty International hailed as the catalyst for the Arab Spring, that there is no mention of the fact that it was the World Social Forum that helped propel Assange from lone hacker to networked political actor and that Howard praises Assange’s work in Pax Technica this seems curious.

There’s another compelling omission in Philip N. Howard’s book Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring – the lack of relationship between poets and revolutionaries.

In Chapter 7 of Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Soul of Tahirwe learn that performance poets played a significant role in promoting the initial events in Egypt. A cursory look into Egypt’s history shows that this is not the first time such artists played a would be significant political role. In The Artist as ProphetChris Hedges open his article on the importance of emotions as a guiding force in politics with a quote from an Egyptian general on how they managed to surprised the Israelis in the 1973 war he states: “Instead of reading the intelligence reports, you should have read our poets.” Were such a connection unique to Egypt then this might be plausibly explained plausibly as a mere oversight – but it’s less so when one considers the actors that have inspired and the activities promoted by Bolivarian Revolutionary Actors.

José Martí is Cuban poet long praised by Castro and other leftists as a guiding light for their cause. Olga Luzardo was a poet and militant that helped found the Communist Party in Venezuela. Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the EZLN who now goes by the name Subcomandante Galeano – someone that Howard would presumably be familiar with having engaged in field research in Chiapas, is a poetas well. Eduardo Galeano, one of the main inspirations and co-conspirators of Bolivarian Movement, is also a poet. So too is Jesus Santrich, one of the current leaders of the FARC. Alice Lovelace, the National Lead Organizer for the United States Social Forum in Atlanta – an event which was, as I go into more detail below, promoted by Venezuelan intelligence – was a poet. Public poetry readings, rap performances and artistic workshop demonstrations and marches all have been hallmarks of the carnivalesque atmosphere encouraged by the Social Forums and all of which are connected to an inter-generational effort at achieving fundamental political change. With this focus on granular details and a comparative context in mind a concrete political strategy comes into view – activities to mobilize emotionally charged, highly expressive individuals into what Manuel Castells calls Networks of Outrage and Hope and what Gustav LeBon calls The Crowd. Strange, then, that this is elided from Howard’s account.

The limited network ethnographic fields which Philip N. Howard’s selects isn’t limited to this singular article. In Pax Technica he similarly described Occupy Wall Street as a “spontaneous” network movement. There Howard states the following:

“People sometimes say that the internet doesn’t “cause” democracy. Or “it’s the people, not the mobile phones.” But people and their technology are often impossible to separate. Try to imagine your life without your mobile phone or your internet connection. Or try to tell the story of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, or any recent international social movement without mentioning digital media. You’ll find yourself with an incomplete story. Many of the people involved with these movements are eager to talk about the devices and media that are their tools of resistance. Their technology and their story go together.”

despite the fact the extensive documentary evidence shows that this was not some “spontaneous” uprising but a political spectacle that was long planned by groups connected to Venezuela such as the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Crimethinc. (documented here and here) as well as poets and performance artists.

His lack of apparent awareness on the matter is all the more unusual considering that Natalia Buier and Tamara Steger were engaged in research about Occupy Wall Street at Central European University at the same time that Philip N. Howard was there.

Had Philip N. Howard spoken to professor Béla Greskovits during his time at Central European University about Janina Alexandra Mangold’s Master’s thesis The Transnational Diffusion of the Occupy Movement to Germanyor to someone that remembered when two of the people claiming to be co-founders of Occupy Wall Street, Noah Fischer and Maria Byckgave a presentation at Central European University he would have realized this. Had he reached out to Zoltán Glück

who’s a Central European University graduate now working on a PhD in Anthropology with a focus on Critical Theory that’s published a number of articles on Occupy Wall Street it would be in his network ethnography. Were Philip N. Howard have taken the time to talk to Daniel Bochsler, a Central European University professor and attendee of a three day workshop entitled The Transnational Dimension of Protest: From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street organized by World Social Forum scholar and organizer Donatella della Porta could have disabused Howard of this notion. Anil Duman, a Central European University Econmics professor and supporter of Occupy the Economy could have done the same. Julia Buxton, a Central European University professor in the Political Sciences department that is an longtime expert on Venezuela – as evidenced by her giving presentations at Socialist Worker events over a decade ago and being published in the New Left Review, which is now based in Quito, Ecuador a few short blocks from the English language offices of Venezuela’s state media outlet TeleSUR – would have told Philip N. Howard the same. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, a founding member of the Action Network– a digital tool for organizing people online that’s published research on the processes involved in World Social Forum and that worked under Philip N Howard at the Central European University could have told him that “It’s not just about the technology, it’s about the IRL human networks”.

Philip N. Howard and Black Lives Matter Supporters

That Philip N. Howard would retweet Charlton McIlwain’s new book Black Software – which covers the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement means nothing by itself. Investigation of aspects of the BLM project is entirely valid, and yet in the greater context of the theoretical underpinnings of Howard’s research projects and the networks he is connected to this is highly significant.

The connections between Cuban-Venezuelan intelligence and the founding of Black Lives Matters is under-reported in the academic and popular press, but begins in earnest following Hurricane Katrina. Sekou M. Franklin provides an account of Venezuela’s financial assistance via the Common Grounds Collective and People’s Hurricane Relief Fund in the chapter African Americans, Transnational Contention, and Cross National Politics in the United States and Venezuela. The condensed version of the story is that oil money started to flow to current and former Black Panther Party members such as Malcolm Suber and Malik Rahim to engage in community assistance projects and so too did black-transnational political agitators from Venezueula such as Jesus “Chucho” Garcia– who has since had his diplomatic credentials revoked. The rationale why was never publicized, but it’s likely because of his advocacy on behalf of the Pan-Africanist movement.

Alicia Garza and Opal Tometti, two of the founders of Black Lives Matter, attended the United States Social Forum in 2007 – the U.S. iteration of Sao Paulo Forum. In the ChapterFrankfurt versus Atlantain Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survivethe author Nicole Doerr describes the United States Social Forum as follows: The Coalition now included job centers as well as student organizations, labor, immigrant organizations, North American indigenous people and black and Latino church-based organizations, many of them lead by women and female or queer-identified leaders.” A few years after this, in 2011 Garza, became the Chairperson of the Right to the City Steering Committee – another Social Forum front and a few years after this Tometti would personally receive an award from Nicholas Maduro. Also worth noting is that recently Philip N. Howard’s director at the CCCE, Lance Bennet, gave a talk with Opal Tometion using technology to mobilize people for protests.

Philip N. Howard: Academic Socialist Steganographist

Steganography is the practice of concealing messages or other content within another message or image in order to avoid detection. In addition to looking at the subjects that interest Philip N. Howard, the research designs errors that he makes in his investigations, the impact they have on public discourse and governmental debate, the activists he chooses not to include and exclude in his ethnographic analysis, his professional associations, the activists he promotes and the people that promote him – one can find evidence of Socialist bias within the theoretical framework he employs.

While one could argue that the unnecessary-to-the-discussion-at-hand citation of Frankfurt School’s Marxists like Adorno and Horkheimer, as Philip N Howard does in Digitizing the Social Contract: Producing American Political Culture in the Age of New Media, constitutes a tell as to his politico-epistemological orientation– this is insufficient evidence. So too is his unnecessary-to-the-discussion-at-hand citation of publications printed by the radical Zed Bookscollective and his familiarity with Marx’s personal history that he cites in his book New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen.

That Philip N. Howard cites Why Not Create a Shadow Government?by Michael Albert – who’s listed on TeleSUR’s websiteas a staff member – in the same article is more notable by itself, all the more so as in Howard’s in-text citation of him and in his listing of him in the References section the author is incorrectly attributed to “Alpert, M” rather than “Albert, Michael”. Without diverting at length into Freudian theories of repression and self-preservation, it’s worth wondering if this is an unconscious disassociation on the part of Howard as a means of intellectual self-preservation. Why is that? I’ll proffer two reasons why.

First is that it obfuscates the schools of thought informing Howard’s article. The first seven pages of results of Howard’s citation on Google does not detect the original article. Going to the website of the magazine listed as the publisher it is discoverable – that is if you know the correct name of the author.

Once someone goes to the ZCommunications landing page, as one needs to do to find the original source, you will learn that their slogan isThe Spirit of Resistance Lives.

ZMagazine, from whence the Albert article came is a “radical print and online periodical”. The Rebels with a Causemovie poster portion of this section’s header image was chosen because the film features Todd Gitlin, who has reviewed Howard’s book New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen– a fact reflected on his CV.

ZVideo, according to their write up, is a way to distribute this particular school of thought’s talks and classes that has “proven more accessible.” The speakers and subjects included in their library  are “Noam Chomsky’s [who has a] humor[ous] and casual speaking style, the dynamism of Hugo Chavez, and the atmosphere of an evening session at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India.”

ZNet is a “community of people committed to social change” and includes people such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos– one of the founders of the World Social Forum; Medea Benjamin– whose advocacy on behalf of Venezuela has granted her audience with Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro and who used to work with Deborah James, the former director of the Venezuela Information Office, someone interviewed as part of Lance Bennett’s Global Citizen Project; Greg Wilpert– who founder of VenezuelaAnalysis and the first Executive Director of TeleSUR English; Mark Weisbrot– who works at Center for Economic and Policy Research; Bill Fletcher– who had a TV show on TeleSUR English called Global African, and many more.

Marisol Sandoval, a Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Creative Industries at City University London writing in A Critical Contribution to the Foundations of Alternative Media Studies – posted in the City, University of London Institutional Repository –  agrees with me. She claims that there is “another type of alternative media that aims at establishing a counter-public sphere” and that “Examples for such a type of media are The New Internationalist, Z Magazine, Rethinking Marxism, Historical Materialism or Monthly Review.”

Secondly rationale is that it obfuscates the specific context which informs Philip N. Howard’s closing contentions. In the article Michael Albert is referred to as a “political hypermedia consultant” and not as the main proponent of Participatory Economics, or ParEcon, which is a form of anarchist economics. In the context of Albert’s larger body of work, he’s not just advocating some political marketing ploy but is using new language to describe V.I. Lenin’s Dual Power political structure – something much debated but groups such as the International Marxist Tendency.

Since I can imagine a reader protesting that this analysis in combination with the above network ethnography is not sufficient evidence to make my case there is, thankfully more that verifies my hypothesis.

In the article Automation, Big Data, and Politics: A Research Review, published in IJOC, Philip N. Howard argues that:

“the time is right to match dedication to critical theoryof algorithmic communication with a dedication to empirical research through audit studies, network ethnography, and investigation of the political economy of algorithmic production.”

How does he know this?

“We review[ed] the great variety of critical scholarship on algorithms, automation, and big data in areas of contemporary life…”

Philip N. Howard then expands on the lines of research he describes in that article in Creativity and Critique: Gap Analysis of Support for Critical Research on Big Data.

Anyone familiar with the Frankfurt School on reading the words I’ve bolded and put in italics and that Philip N. Howard includes in the keywords for the article should immediately pick up on what they reference. For those not familiar with compound components of critical theory one could download the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory, which has entries that explain “even the most complex of theoretical discourses, such as Marxism.” To keep things succinct, however, I’ll provide a brief explanation as it relates just to this case.

In Introduction: Critical Scholarship, Practice and Education by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel Di Mauro states that:

“The term “critical” refers to a tradition of critical theory. An often cited representative of this tradition is the so-­called Frankfurt School. This “school” consisted of a network of researchers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which operated from 1923 to 1933, moved to New York during the Nazi regime, but reopened in Frankfurt in 1950. Although the label “Frankfurt School” is problematic and inexact, it does permit associating some basic ideas with the notion of “critical”.

And on page 4 the authors continue that: “Another important figure in critical scholarship is Karl Marx”

In the article The Problem with “Critical” Studies by Joseph Heath – professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto – Heath describes reading a number of books for a prize and noticing a number of “profoundly cringe-inducing” patterns in them:

“the ambition for “critical social science” was to have, not just social science guided by normative commitments, but for those normative commitments to be made explicit. The biggest problem with the books I read is that they almost invariably failed on the second half of this.”

Indeed, this is the assessment Jolene Zepcevski’s puts forward in her review of Philip N. Howard – Why ‘Pax Technica’ Is A Good Book with a Bad Argument.–

Despite the opening claim that the book will analyze ICT policy, all it really does is advance a number of normative commitments that are socialist in nature. This is evident not only in his choice of framing the evolution of options which net technologies present to social groups – evolving from Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, to Lance Bennett’s Logic of Collective Action– but also in the wider, transnational framework which he uses.

After Philip N. Howard provides a bafflegab definition for the term Pax Technica  he states on page 147 that in this new arrangement of world power:

“In the pax technica, the core and the periphery are not territorially assigned but socially and technologically constructed.”

The concept of core and periphery emerges from World Systems Research and is strongly associated with the theorist who popularized it within the social sciences, the Marxist Immanuel Wallerstein.

Explaining all of the components of the theory and the reasons why this variant of dependency theory didn’t get the goods it’s promoters promised developing countries would fill a series of books – so here I’ll just point out that those who abided by its principles often frequently sought to apply solutions for problems based on pre-existing political commitments and thereby worsened them. There’s numerous examples of this in Pax Technica, but as it would require extensive exegesis I’ll instead point to Philip N Howard’s Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents. There he makes an appeal to human rights that aren’t codified into law and writes that:

“social media sites and proprietary device networks can change their terms of service at any time without informing visitors, turning any speech or activity on the site into a criminal act. For Sandvig and others, this is a violation of the Fifth Amendment right to due process, which requires proper notice to the public of what constitutes criminal behavior”.

For anyone that has a basic understanding of law, there is a significant difference between the Terms of Service on a private social media platform and state and federal legal regulations.

No matter what one may say about the growth of the importance of social media in the general population’s consumption of news media – a person being kicked off Twitter or Instagram for violation of Terms of Service is worlds apart from government agents swarming a facility used to print material, confiscating the equipment and preventing them from publishing and circulating materials. These types of appeals to abstract rights abound in Philip N. Howard and helps explain why he has advocated for the Nationalization of Facebook on Slate – a policy position which is also promoted by the Communists Paul Mason and Lewis Bassett.

Philip N. Howard – Liberation Technologist

Lest this seem like an distorted reading of the Philip N. Howard’s theoretical framework it’s worth pointing out that he closes Pax Technicain praise of what he calls liberation technologies.

Whereas Liberation Theology is the importation and use of Marxist concepts absent from Christian doctrinefor the pursuit of geopolitical goals, liberation technology is a term widely used within the crypto-anarchistand cyber-communistcommunities to describe how the newest iteration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will be used in order to bring about the revolution.

While the modern conception is typically rooted in the speculated capabilities of present, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and People’s Commissar for Education and Culture Georg Lukas anticipated this in his notion of totality, as described in History and Class Consciousness.

Advocates of Liberation Theology and Liberation Technology share a similar worldview. Whereas the former sees the eschaton– the end of history – as emerging from mass conversion to “true” Christianity, at the end of an AK-47 if need be, the latter sees it as emerging from “true” non-mediated social relations, at the expense of breaking all existent laws, customs and social mores if need be.

For Liberation Theologists Colombia’s National Liberation Army, the ELN, is representative of such an ideologically-aligned organization. Their engagement in kidnapping, drug-trafficking, assassinations etc. is excusable as it is “God’s work”.

For Liberation Technologists Wikileaks and Anonymous, aka organizations engaged in terrorism-related activities are representative of such an ideologically-aligned organization. Indeed the Tor network, developed by Liberation Technologist Roger Dingledine, has helped facilitate drug trafficking and the financing of terrorism.

While the merits of apps such as Tsunamic Democraticand other platforms aimed at uniting disparate interest groups for political protest and organization are open for debate – it is certainly clear by the above analysis of Philip N. Howard’s published academic work and the existent case-history of “liberation technology” that advocacy of such positions using such terms is akin to how “Hands Off Venezuela” is equivalent to “Viva Socialism!”.

Philip N Howard – Audience Reception

Lest my interpretation of Philip N. Howard’s oeuvre seem to improperly highlight certain elements of his work, I’ve decided to highlight below some of how other researchers interpret his work.

The following section exhibits how Philip N. Howard’s work has been interpreted by other experts in the field and provides network ethnographic descriptions of the individuals and organizations that have cited his work which help prove, along with all of the other evidence, Philip N. Howard’s membership in the REDH network.

Philip N Howard – Perceived as akin to Paulo Freire, Marxist Pedagogue

In Radical Pockets of Digital Democracy: Deleuzian Grandeur? Luke J. Heemsbergena lecturer at Deakin University and writer of WikiLeaks apologiaclaims that Philip N. Howard’s four year Network Ethnography match the views of Paulo Freire.

Paulo Freire, along with Marx, Gramsci and General Zamora, are some of the most revered thought-leaders amongst those advocating 21^stcentury socialism.

While not reflective of Philip N. Howard per se, it is nevertheless interesting to note that Dr. John Asimakopoulos, a sociology professor at CUNY-Bronx who identifies as an organic intellectual– an allusion to the Marxist Antonio Gramsci – decided to advertise his book The Next Great Transformation from Kleptocracy Capitalism to Libertarian Socialism through Counter Ideology, Societal Education, & Direct Action, which has a forward by Marxist educator Peter McLaren, in the brochure for the APSA Politics After the Digital Revolution Conference– an event at which  Philip N. Howard gave a presentation.

Other academics, that have wrote long format reviews of Howard, Evgeny Morozov, for instance, identifies as a Marxist and Todd Gitlin has been named as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Robinson Salazar Péreza, a Mexican Critical Theorist and Social Scientist, also promotes Howard, in the context of documents which explicitly references the Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity (REDH).

 Philip N. Howard – Perceived as akin to Cristian Fuchs, Marxist Cultural Theorist

Another person with whom Philip N. Howard is frequently associated with is Christian Fuchs.

The author of books such as Social Media: A Critical Guideand Reading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism– after signing up to his Triple C (Communication, Capitalism, Critique) email list I learned that the email server that he uses is the same one used by the ELN (as you can see from the above) and the FARC (as you can tell by looking here).

In Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News by Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young, part of a series called Disruptions put out by Routledge press, the authors similar cite Philip N Howard in the same context as Christian Fuchs.

In Rethinking Ideology in the Age of Global Discontent: Bridging Divides a book edited by by Barrie Axford, Didem Buhari-Gulmez, Seckin Baris Gulmez Fuchs and Howard are again placed side by side – not in contrast, but complementarily.

In Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy Siva Vaidhyanathan, who also authored the book The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System similarly seems to think that the avowed Marxist Fuchs and Philip N. Howard have similar views.

Philip N. Howard’s Research Promoted by Methods and Organizations Connected to Cuban-Venezuelan Intelligence Agencies

As Wikipedia is an interesting place to determine an author’s reception I decided to search there for instances of Philip N. Howard’s name.

The first citation I examined was made by a Wikipedia user without a page named CWDrea whose only contributions was three edits made to the Arab Spring page.

The content of those edits were to make the claim that the Arab Spring protests were completely non-violent – an empirically false claim attested to by numerous journalists, activists and government authorities present at the events – as well as to include a citation of Philip N. Howard’s article ICT’s and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring.

A second citation of Philip N. Howard came from a student in a 2016 Columbia University Course called Order and Violence taught by Christopher Blattman.

When I looked at Blattman’s Curriculum Vitae, I learned that he’s a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy and Research.

The CEPR has published a number of research articles that are, according to Clifton Ross and the numerous others subject area experts he cites in his article Pandering to the Imperial Left: The New CEPR Report “crude piece[s] of gringo-chavista whitewashing aimed at gaining sympathy for “the cause”.

This isn’t surprising when one looks at the people involved in the organization. One of its board members is “Danny Glover, who received over 18 million dollars from Hugo Chavez. Joseph Stiglitz, a long-time Bolivarian Revolution defender and advocate of state-centric economic behavior is also a board member of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, as is Venezuela crisis denier Mark Weisbrot and Warden Bellow, a founding member and promoter of the Sao Paulo Forum. Mark Levinson, who is a lifelong advocate of Democratic Socialism is also on the board as is Deborah James – the former executive director of the Venezuela Information Office and a participant in Lance Bennett’s Global Voices project. Eileen Applebaum, who’s cited by TeleSUR here, is also a member.

After Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa fled the country for definitive charges of corruption and the rumors that Venezuela’s ally the FARC-EP had helped fund his campaign, three of the executive leaders of Center for Economic Policy and Research were among the signatories of a public warning about the dangers of Ecuador “returning to neoliberalism”.

Who thought fit to share this public declaration of anti-neoliberalism? Cuba’s Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity.

This, notably, wasn’t the only Sao Paulo Forum associated intellectual to promote Philip N. Howard.

David Evan Harris, a Sao Paulo University graduate whose first writings are about the benefits of ALBA also promotes Philip N. Howard. Two of his articles appear within the syllabus for the Social Movements & Social Mediacourse he teachers. I could certainly find more evidence in the academic world that proves my point of Dr. Howard’s connections REDH, but I’ll stop for now to summarize and close my case.

Given all these overlaps in “elective” affinities it’s perhaps no surprise that Philip N. Howard’s research was cited in an editorial hosted on TeleSUR – El neoliberalismo millenial y la campaña de Bolsonaro, or The Neoliberal Millenia and Bolsonaro’s Campaignand by the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Malaysia.

I find this latter research-article especially revealing as it implies that the popular rejection of Evo Morales from Bolivia supported by law enforcement officers and the military due to his corrupt patronage networks and anti-democratic activities is marred as “less justified” because of Twitter bots. Like the Communists in the Chiapas, Egypt and Occupy, here again Howard presents a false picture of faceless movements. Because of this poor theoretical underpinning and reliance upon categorically invalid forms of quantitative social science he fails to investigate the much more telling facts of the matter such as disinformation networks connected to news outlets, the extensive circulation online of deepfake nudes within Pro-Nicholas Marudo Facebook groups intended to humiliate Jeanine Añez and Fabiana Rosales de Guaidó, evidence that photos claiming to be protest violence by police that are staged with makeup and actors or are from different times and locations, or going into the issues I mentioned earlier about Venezuela’s online and in real life activity. Indeed, the bullets of messages in an information warfare often comprise equally of what is not there as what is.

Philip N. Howard: Conclusion

All of the above evidence indicates that Philip N. Howard is a member of the Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence sponsored Network of Intellectuals and that one of the activities that is required of him in exchange for professional support is for him to use his credentials as an expert to deceive the Public and to provide fraudulent or misleading testimony to government bodies perceived as enemies to REDH.

The sum rationale for this argument developed into the following propositions:

1. Someone that had previously corrected errors in his publications, but refuses do so as it relates to research that misdirects attention from Venezuela
2. Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the Brexit vote
3. Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the election of U.S. president Donald Trump
4. Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the election of Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro
5. Someone whose first instance of field-research was covering a Communist insurgency (Zapatistas) in Mexico that exploited individual activists, academics and NGOs for political ends along netwar lines
6. Someone who engaged in embedded investigation with an organization (Indymedia) formed in the wake of the Zapatista conflict to replicate their model worldwide
7. Someone whose supervisor at the University of Washington helped organize the NorthWest Social Forum – a political organization promoted by and directly connected to Venezuelan intelligence
8. Someone who helped found an academic program funded and promoted by George Soros, which was populated by multiple academics associated with the World Social Forum and Occupy Wall Street
9. Someone who receives grant money from organizations that also support avowedly socialist academic projects
10. Someone whose public political positions related to Steve Bannon are the same as the Canadian Communist Party, the Hands Off Venezuela network, and the British Socialist Workers Party
11. Someone who – like numerous other socialist parties and academics not open as to their party affiliation – advocates for the nationalization of Facebook
12. Someone who has published a monograph about one of the main Marxist sociologists that has multiple, active connections to the São Paulo Forum, the PSUV and the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity
13. Someone that promotes the research of Black Lives Matters/Black Liberation Movement associated sociological research
14. Someone whose published academic uses cryptic allusions to Communist schools of thought in their theoretical framework and avows to being a Critical Theorist
15. Someone who promotes the Liberation Technology school of thought, which is a variation of the socialist Liberation Theology movement
16. Someone that promotes other artists and intellectuals whose activism and political positions align with the goals of Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence Services
17. Someone whose published academic work is promoted via methods typical of Cuba and Venezuela’s Network of Intellectuals and Artists
18. Someone whose published academic work is promoted by actors associated with Cuba and Venezuela’s Network of Intellectuals and Artists
19. Someone who refuses to answer questions about their research and their political connections despite such behavior violating the spirit and letter of the appropriate academic professional code of ethics
20. Someone whose speech acts provided to the US and UK government can be described, respectably, as misdirection and disinformation

is an enchufado scholar, that is a scholar that is “plugged in” to provide services and material support to the regime of Nicolas Maduro in exchange for the receipt of benefits and funding.

After all, it certainly appears that the effect of Howard’s academic publishing and testimony is to spread disinformation and encourage misdirection on behalf of the Socialist network which has helped make Philip N. Howard appear to be an expert in a field of ICT and not just a partisan political advocate in an Oxford robe.