For a Racket special project, bodies needed

I started working on the #TwitterFiles months ago in the hope of answering a question about whether or not the government was teaming up with private platforms to censor political content. The answer quickly proved a decisive yes, but I’ve since run into a larger, more troubling problem that’s going to require many more person-hours and digging to understand.

For a one-time project we’re aiming to publish in March, Racket needs a hand. We’re looking for the following:

— a reporter or academic with experience researching government contracts, and/or the funding of NGOs or academic research institutions

— an infographics designer, preferably with experience in areas like ecosystem mapping

Though we already have an excellent FOIA writer, experience in that area could be a plus. If you have other skills in mining publicly available information, you could be a fit for the project. Applicants should write to racketnews@protonmail.com. This is not volunteer work — we pay — but it is temporary.

What’s the job? Assignments will vary, and you’d be working under an editor (not me), but roughly: we’re trying to map a new wing of the U.S. government’s propaganda apparatus that popped into view thanks to the Twitter Files. State-directed censorship is scary, but the more disturbing activity we’re seeing inside companies like Twitter involves what you might call “offensive” information operations, a type of aggressive official messaging that all governments practice but is supposed to be restricted by law in the United States.

For decades, our government at least loosely complied with legislation like the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibits aiming at the domestic population any official propaganda “intended for foreign audiences.” However, gloves came off in recent years.

In a remarkably short time since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has funded an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent “disinformation experts.” They describe their posture as defensive — merely “tracking” or “countering” foreign disinformation — but in truth they aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests.

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