Twitter Files: Who Are the People Claiming RFK Jr. is “Disinformation”?

Disinformation experts often lack any obvious expertise.

9 minute read

During several trips earlier this year to Twitter’s San Francisco HQ, I ran across internal emails claiming that Robert Kennedy Jr. spews disinformation. Instead of trying to adjudicate these claims—which would likely be impossible—I decided to ask few obvious questions:

Who are these people?

Who funds them?

How did they become “disinformation experts”?

In one example, Twitter employees took action on several accounts after a shady, dark money group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released a report alleging that just 12 accounts produced the majority of anti-vaccine disinformation on social media. “There isn’t any evidence to support this claim,” Facebook responded in a statement dismissing CCDH’s report.

Nonetheless, the report’s simplistic findings proved catnip to the White House and most media outlets.

“Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,” reported NPR, regurgitating back CCDH’s allegations. Quoting the group’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, NPR added, “The 'Disinformation Dozen' produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.”

Like other outlets, NPR ignored Facebook’s later statement rejecting the findings of Ahmed’s group, and the reporter never bothered to ask Ahmed who funds his organization and how he acquired his expertise in disinformation. A few years before rebranding himself as a vaccine and disinformation expert, Ahmed was a British Labour Party political operative best known for writing the book New Serfdom which argued against free market ideology.

In a second incident, Twitter received an email from Indiana University’s Filippo Menczer, a professor of computer science and informatics, who has also made a name for himself as an expert in the disinformation space. Menczer sent the email in late 2021, to alert his fellow misinformation activists that the Associated Press had quoted a website he had created to rank COVID vaccine disinformation accounts.

Menczer’s work to both define and track disinformation comes seven years after he denied doing this very same thing. In a 2014 Washington Post essay, a member of the Federal Communications Commission first complained that Menczer’s research could be used to define and monitor “misinformation” on Twitter and potentially suppress free speech.

At that time, Menczer denied on the university’s website that his research was being used as a political watchdog, or to define misinformation. He also said his research was not being used “to develop standards of online political speech.”

But that was then, this is now.

In an essay he published last January, Menczer explained how his scientific studies could be used to guide government officials regulating social media companies like Twitter. “Science could help policymakers understand which regulations work and what their unintended consequences can be, whether they are internal platform policies or rules imposed by legislation.”

Center for disinformation dark money

Started by Imran Ahmed, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) sprang out of nowhere in late 2017 or early 2018. At the time, Ahmed was leaving a job as a political advisor to members of the British Labour Party and had just written a book.

As we chronicle in our just published book The New Serfdom, the dominance of market fundamentalism has been a disastrous experiment that has ripped up social cohesion and solidarity while the gap between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent has soared to levels not seen since the beginning of the last century. Home ownership, secure employment and fair wages seem like relics of a bygone era. Meanwhile exploitative workplace practices have created a new serfdom leaving many people trapped in insecure, unfulfilling and underpaid work with no escape route.

How this background as a political operative prepared Ahmed to brand himself as an expert in disinformation is unclear. His LinkedIn account makes no mention of his work as a political operative in England, although his biography at CCDH states that he is an “authority on social and psychological malignancies on social media, such as identity-based hate, extremism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.”

Ahmed now lives in Washington DC and his organization does not provide a list of funders.

In early 2021, CCDH posted a report titled “The Disinformation Dozen” that alleged the majority of COVID vaccine disinformation came from just 12 accounts, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Ahmed released the report just as the Biden administration began their COVID vaccine rollout and shortly before the House held hearings on disinformation at social media companies.

Twitter officials began sharing Ahmed’s findings, soon after CCDH released them that March. “COVID-19 misinfo enforcement team is planning on taking action on a handful of accounts surfaced by the CCDH report,” reads a March 31 email, noting that Ahmded’s report was released right before the House held a hearing on disinformation where Facebook’s Mark Zuckeberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsy both testified, along with Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Noting that Twitter had done a deep dive on all the accounts CCDH cited, the official continued, “While none of the 12 accounts are eligible for permanent suspension under COVID-19 misinformation policy, we did find several violations.”

The email then lists several tweets identified for misinformation.

For example, in a tweet that same March, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote that he had sent a letter to President Biden stating “transparency, robust science and a functional surveillance system are the only ways to build public trust for the COVID vaccine.”

Twitter placed a “Vaccine Safety” label on this tweet (When Elon Musk took over Twitter, these labels were removed).

Another Tweet by an apparent physician advised people to avoid a free Krispy Kreme donut for getting vaccinated and get a free gym membership instead, also got a violation and a “Vaccine Safety” label.

White House spokesperson Jen Psaki later cited the CCDH report during a July 2021 press briefing to bring greater pressure onto Facebook to censor accounts. Facebook then dismissed Ahmed’s report in a public statement:

The report upon which the faulty narrative is based analyzed only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users. They are in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines in the past months on Facebook. Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as “anti-vax” or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis. There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a “representative sample” of the content shared across our apps.

In a bumbling campaign they ran the year prior, CCDH targeted 10 websites for allegedly posting racist narratives. CCDH claimed in one example that Zero Hedge had run a racist article that stated Black Lives Matter is "practically a revolutionary operative of the CIA via Soros" and another article that suggested Black Lives Matter is a George Soros “Astroturf” campaign for “leftists and their agenda to reshape the fabric of American society.”

Fact checkers with the NBC News “verify unit” fell for CCDH’s fake report, writing, “Google has banned two far-right websites from its advertising platform after research revealed the tech giant was profiting from articles pushing unsubstantiated claims about the Black Lives Matter protests.”

In fact, the passages CCDH cited did not appear in Zero Hedge articles, but beneath the articles in the hundreds of readers comments posted without moderation. The following day, NBC stealth edited their article to remove CCDH’s misinformation, instead of running a correction.

Zero Hedge responded by working with Google to moderate their comments section.

I emailed CCDH a few questions to try and understand who they are and who funds them.

1) Who funds you? I don't understand why you don't list your donors. Can you explain that to readers?

2) Are you funded by the pharmaceutical industry? 

3) Have you ever done a fact check or report on misinformation by one of the pharmaceutical companies?

CCDH did not respond to requests for comment.

Academic mission creep

Back in 2014, misinformation researcher Filippo Menczer came under heavy criticism from a member of the Federal Communications Commission who wrote a Washington Post essay calling his federally funded research “Orwellian”:

Named "Truthy," after a term coined by TV host Stephen Colbert, the project claims to use a "sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex network models" to distinguish between memes that arise in an "organic manner" and those that are manipulated into being.

But there's much more to the story. Focusing in particular on political speech, Truthy keeps track of which Twitter accounts are using hashtags such as #teaparty and #dems. It estimates users' "partisanship." It invites feedback on whether specific Twitter users, such as the Drudge Report, are "truthy" or "spamming." And it evaluates whether accounts are expressing "positive" or "negative" sentiments toward other users or memes.

The Truthy team says this research could be used to "mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate."

Menczer’s university responded with a public statement denying that his research was “attempting to track political misinformation in a way that would somehow limit free speech.” Menczer then put up his own webpage to shoot down misinformation about his misinformation research, stating that he was not trying to be a political watchdog, define misinformation, or develop standards of online political speech.

As reported at the time by the Indy Star, “Neither IU nor the government is controlling, or even monitoring, tweets of individuals. And researchers are certainly not evaluating the ‘correctness’ of every tweet.”

Menczer later told the Columbia Journalism Review that criticism of him had nothing to do with the reality of his research—it merely confirmed the problem of misinformation.

“The headlines are saying something that is completely false and fabricated,” Menczer said. “We are not defining hate speech. We are not tracking people. We don’t have a database.” 

“I think, unfortunately, this is exactly the type of misinformation machinery that we study,” Menczer said.

Fast forward several years and what is Menczer doing? Defining types of speech as hateful misinformation, tracking people’s social media, and creating an online database.

In December 2021, Menczer emailed a misinformation group that the Associated Press had quoted a website he had created to rank COVID vaccine disinformation accounts. “Our CoVaxx dashboard quoted in the article, ranks CHD as the top source of COVID vaccine disinformation,” Menczer wrote. The abbreviation “CHD” stands for Children’s Health Defense, the group Kennedy runs.

Menczer also wrote that CHD misused his website’s findings. “Ironically, CHD used our data in a misleading way to claim in a recent op-ed that they are the most trusted source of information about COVID vaccines (they omitted the low-credibility label).”

Ironically, Menczer’s statement is itself misinformation. In the op-ed Menczer links to in the email, Kennedy does NOT state that his organization is the “most trusted source of information about vaccines.” Kennedy just repeats Menczer’s claims that his organization’s articles are widely shared, with his own interpretation of what this means:

According to recent data from Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, CHD’s website is shared on Twitter more often than those of the World Health Organization and CDC combined. This indicates that a growing number of Americans and citizens of the world are saying no to their government imposing health mandates, recommendations and other personal choices on them and their children that is clearly in violation of their individual rights. The same data also showed that CHD’s content, which recently reached nearly 10 million page views per month, is more widely shared than that from Reuters, The Daily Mail, The Washington Post, Newsweek and CNN.

Menczer’s email ended up at Twitter after he posted it to the Google Group “Combatting Fake News: The Science of Misinformation.” This group apparently claims that research to censor some news as fake actually strengthens the First Amendment.

#FakeNewsSci seeks to cultivate and continue an academic and practical agenda around defining and protecting against fake news and misinformation, and work to build news literacy, defend a free press and strengthen first amendment principles

When explaining his research, Menczer sometimes makes it appear abstract and nebulous. When he won a recent $1.2 million Department of Defense grant to study misinformation, his university put out a statement describing the objectives thusly: “to develop a cognitive network model that describes the consistencies and inconsistencies of a belief system while also establishing the simulation mechanisms that determine how a given idea is best accepted and incorporated by an agent to fit into preexisting beliefs.”

Can the average person even understand what this means?

At other times Menczer is more direct in highlighting that his research can help government officials regulate speech—something he denied back in 2014. “A rigorous scientific approach could prevent much of the chaos that we are currently witnessing as Musk tries new approaches that scare away advertisers and users,” Menczer wrote in an essay a few months back, criticizing today’s more freewheeling Twitter.

The title of that essay? “Using Science To Guide Social Media Regulation.”