There’s a see-saw effect at work in society. When something good happens, there’s a bad reaction (think of the ACA) and vice versa.
Consider 2017. Much of the news has been bad then rapidly progressed up the scale of intensity to worse and worst. But the reaction has been an overwhelming upswing in the opposite direction: massive peaceful protests, the birth and rapid growth of Indivisible, the 400%+ increase in the number of those filing with the FEC to run for office, especially women.
For me the most astonishing news to come out of 2017 is the emergence of a potent new force in our society: crowdsourced research, a citizen investigations team.
Research is no longer the sole province of investigative reporters, mainly because they have failed us so monumentally since the end of the Watergate affair.
We don’t have to look far to see glaring examples of their decline either, especially this century. Nowadays the Pulitzer goes to stories that have little to no impact on society. This year it went to the journalist who uncovered the fact that Trump hadn’t donated to charity as he said he would. While soundly researched and a nice bit of reporting, it might just as well have been about what Trump has for breakfast for all the impact it had on the country in general and the presidential race in particular.
There were much bigger stories waiting to be told but mainstream media either ignored them, actively covered them up, set out to normalise the profoundly abnormal, or reported on scandals concocted by GOP propaganda. Even some of the fake news provided courtesy of Russian Disinformation (Deza) operations trickled into the mainstream via rightwing conduits.
It was the NY Times which began the whole emails scandal when one of their writers falsely reported that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address violated department rules (the original articles have been scrubbed from the NY Times’ website, a common practice for them). He admitted his mistake but it was too late. The NY Times had noted the number of clicks it produced and recognised just how much juice there was in such a scandal. It was a gift to writers like Maureen Dowd, a malicious purveyor of gossipy propaganda. With the complicit cooperation of the NY Times, reporters huffed and puffed on the tiny flame ignited by the original reporter until it became a raging scandal picked up and picked over by all media eager to force the ‘scandal’ upon the attentions of the public and, eventually, the FBI. There never was anything to the story but it did serve to demonstrate, with terrifying clarity, how powerful a force media is when they set out to shape public opinion.
Yet when it came to Trump, the GOP, their campaigns and Russian ties, the same NY Times — in concert with its sister media — demurred like a coy virgin. Oh no, they couldn’t possibly publish these “rumors” — there was no proof! Well, yes, three of the seventeen intelligence agencies had warned electoral officials about the likelihood of Russian interference in the election but surely they were being self-aggrandizing and overly punctilious. Nothing to see here.
Because of their sorry record in failing to cover the 2016 election fairly, a carry-over from their disgraceful effort in 2014 — remember the “Great Ebola Panic” of the 2014 midterms that was miraculously cured on election day? — confidence in media honesty and fairness is at an all-time low. To compensate for their neglect, to fill the abyss of knowledge-unreported, a new movement is rapidly supplanting media outlets as sources of information.
It’s the crowdsourced research and investigations team, a potent grassroots movement engendered by the need for information and truth in an era of “alternate facts”. If the media wouldn’t dig into data and report the findings, they would. They may be unpaid volunteers but they are determined, dedicated and unstoppable.
The first project to use crowdsourcing — aka COSINT (crowd-sourced intelligence gathering) — for the purposes of research, was organized by Huffington Post’s White House reporter, Christina Wilkie. She was faced with reams of data in documents listing donations to the Trump inauguration, and turned to her Twitter followers for help.
It was an inspired move to ask for citizen researchers to help out. At first there was a trickle of volunteers from her own followers.
But it was a huge undertaking that needed a great many more people to join the effort.
Then suddenly Wilkie was inundated with volunteers after her call for help was retweeted by higher profile Twitter accounts with followers in the tens of thousands. Volunteers were issued with a page from the donor docs and literally spent hours drilling down on each one.
Within days, Wilkie had solid results on a project that would’ve consumed several months had she undertaken it by herself.
Raw Story picked up on the project when it revealed evidence of massive fraud with possible money laundering involved. Five days later, Trump’s Inauguration Committee were forced to make a public statement. It came across as being as phony as much of the donor list proved to be. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the FBI found the revelations dug up by Wilkie’s citizen research team very interesting indeed and germane to their current investigations.
Before Christina Wilkie’s project was completed, another far larger citizen research project was launched by Mike Farb who was soon joined by Ruben Major, Democratic candidate for the California Assembly in District 76, with additional input from Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog who hosts a regular radio broadcast carried by Daily Kos every weekday between 10:30am and 11:30am.
Mike’s project is called Unhack The Vote and he is using COSINT to investigate voter suppression, gerrymandering, Crosscheck and election-rigging. What he and his team of over a thousand volunteers have uncovered so far has had profound effects on all involved. There’s been stunned amazement, anger and many many tears as old certainties are crushed under the weight of new and compelling evidence.
This is one of the videos that had an enormous impact on his volunteers and helped recruit even more people to the cause. If you have 8 minutes, watch this:
***
***
And it isn’t just about data, there’s anecdotal stories too from voters and election officials. It’s also about election laws. Volunteers are discovering laws in their states that disallow vote recounts (Florida) and/or prohibit any investigation of voting machines (Pennsylvania). There’s talk about class action suits challenging the legality of Crosscheck and the constitutionality of unfair state election laws.
It’s a massive undertaking and they are still looking for volunteers to help out. I will be writing up their story in more detail in the days to come.
This new force, arm-in-arm with Indivisible and all the groups that comprise the citizen’s army we proudly call The Resistance, is the genesis of an historical turning point that will orientate this nation in a new, progressive direction. It is a force to be reckoned with, a force hellbent on exposing criminality and crushing corruption. It is the powerful backlash the republicans never expected and it’s primed to stop them in their tracks. It’s the combined force of people who are not waiting for someone to save them but are uniting to save their country themselves. It is the force unstoppable.