Parler Games
Just when it seemed that Parler, a favored social media platform of the extreme right, was finally going to lay out its “amended” list of legal grievances against Amazon, Parler’s lawyers dramatically switched gears last week.
Since January, they’d been tangling with Amazon in federal court over Parler’s suspension from the Amazon cloud after the Capitol insurrection. But the lawsuit hadn’t been going well for Parler and on March 2, instead of hitting a deadline for filing Parler’s amended federal complaint (a deadline that had been extended twice, at Parler’s request) attorneys for the company delivered a late-night notice that Parler was simply dropping its federal antitrust and business interference case.
Did that mean Parler v. Amazon was finished? No.
About six hours before Parler’s 11 p.m. federal court filing (and exactly three minutes before closing time at the King County Superior Court clerk’s office in downtown Seattle), Parler had filed a new, state-level lawsuit against Amazon.
That lawsuit contains an extensive list of non-federal allegations, including that Amazon “breached its contract to host Parler’s website and app on [Amazon’s] cloud services, in bad faith”; then “defamed” Parler while explaining Parler’s suspension; and, along the way, racked up numerous violations of state consumer protection laws plus a violation of a Seattle law against ideological discrimination.
“An extreme attempt to forum shop” is how Amazon attorneys describe Parler’s latest gambit. Amazon’s press people called the new claims meritless and company lawyers quickly yanked Parler’s new suit back into federal court, arguing that Parler’s state case is built from “the same nucleus of facts” as its former federal suit (which, prior to being dropped, had been described by Federal Judge Barbara Rothstein as containing “inaccurate and unsupported” allegations).
Parler wasted no time in blasting Amazon’s removal of its new case to federal court. Parler lawyers called Amazon’s move “a trick” that’s based on “strained” and “controversial” readings of legal rules, and they told their new federal judge, Marsha J. Pechman, that Parler wants its current case returned to state court. There, Parler could eventually present a Seattle area jury with its arguments about Amazon being a mean-spirited monopolist that “pulled Parler’s plug” and then, not done harming a relatively small social media startup, proceeded to “kick Parler while it was down.”
It will be several weeks before the venue brawl reaches a conclusion. In the meantime, given that Parler’s brought up ideology, it’s worth peering into the strange ideological brew of this newly filed case.
The state-level lawsuit was brought by an interesting mix of recently-hired Parler lawyers that includes Chris Bartolomucci and Gene Schaerr, two east coast veterans of conservative legal battles; an eastern Washington attorney, David Groesbeck, who’s worked on Republican causes in the past but has little obvious experience relevant to the issues at hand; and Angelo Calfo, a prominent Seattle attorney.
Calfo’s Twitter feed suggests he’s a Colbert-watching Trump skeptic, his resume includes time as a federal prosecutor plus experience doing complex business litigation, and public records show he’s donated mainly to Democratic politicians (including $5,600 to support Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and political action committee).
Parler, the client presumably paying these attorneys, is majority owned by a conservative heiress, Rebekah Mercer, whose wealth traces to her billionaire father, former hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. Over the years, Rebekah Mercer’s political investments—Ted Cruz, Breitbart, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and now Parler—have all been key to the rise of government-bashing, nativist populism on the right.
While none of Mercer’s big-name investments are popular in liberal Seattle, there are certain areas where the brand of right-wing populism she’s supported overlaps considerably with Seattle’s own strain of left-wing populism. One of those areas of overlap is antipathy toward tech giants like Amazon, and Parler’s new state lawsuit appears to be pitched precisely at this sweet spot. (With some trollish curve-balls thrown in for good measure.)
Parler’s description of Amazon in its new suit could have been copied from a street-level protest against the company or an Elizabeth Warren campaign speech. It cites Glenn Greenwald on Amazon’s “show of monopolistic force” against Parler. It alleges that Amazon is more concerned about protecting market share than people’s rights. It describes Amazon as an “anticompetitive” bully that uses “deceptive” tactics, operates a commercial empire built atop exploitative “surveillance capitalism,” and deploys its “Big Tech” tentacles to squeeze the life out of bothersome upstarts. (Including by “directing hackers to Parler’s backup datacenters,” the complaint says.)
The curve-ball here is that the purported victim of this allegedly rapacious monopolist is an upstart digital platform controlled by Rebekah Mercer and suspected of incubating right-wing violence.
Due to Amazon’s suspension, Mercer’s Parler will lose “hundreds of millions of dollars in annual advertising revenue,” according to the new state lawsuit, which links the suspension to an alleged discriminatory impulse on Amazon’s part that, the suit says, is forbidden by municipal law in liberal Seattle.
“Amazon discriminated against Parler due to the conservative content its users frequently posted,” the new Parler lawsuit claims. “Amazon did this to curry favor both with their own employees and with the incoming Biden administration, as well as out of the organization’s own dominant political ideology.”
Does this all amount to a brilliant, culture-jamming backup case brought by a winningly heterodox team? A tired trolling effort dressed up in new legal clothes? Or merely a fool’s errand full of billable hours green-lit by an upset billionaire’s daughter?
As they say in conservative, liberal, elite, and populist media: Stay tuned.
“The Long Fuse”
It’s taken years for Americans to not quite figure out how online misinformation affected the 2016 presidential election. But now, just four months out from the rollercoaster 2020 election, we have a very thorough report on how digital misinformation operated during the extended Trump v. Biden battle.
Titled “The Long Fuse,” this report was put together by researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, and others who were part of something called the “Election Integrity Partnership.” Based on lessons learned in 2016 and 2018, they aimed to document 2020’s election-related online misinformation, counter it in real time when they could, and analyze its pathways and enablers.
There’s a 90-minute discussion of the group’s findings that’s probably worth your time if, like me, you’re highly interested and spent way more than 90 minutes over the last year gobbling up online political news, politicized news, and probably some amount of misinformation that’s responsible for our present “information disorder.” There’s also a written report that’s 265 pages long BUT, mercifully, contains a brief, six-page executive summary that’ll give you the highlights.
One of the biggest takeaways, for me, was that unlike in 2016, when the most notable disinformation effort emanated from Russia, during 2020 the collective foreign online interference operations of Russia, China, and Iran were dwarfed by the disinformation efforts of Americans.
In other words, we are getting much better at doing this to ourselves.
The results, as noted in the first sentence of the report, include a searing event that was hard to imagine until it rather predictably happened: “On January 6, 2021, an armed mob stormed the US Capitol to prevent the certification of what they claimed was a ‘fraudulent election.’”
The report’s analysis of the pathways by which all this American-produced misinformation ends up warping minds, shaping political decisions, and inspiring insurrectionists is important. It’s also sobering. It finds a powerful interplay between average people who’ve been primed to believe falsehoods (for example, by Trump’s long-running prediction that the election would be stolen) and the online “influencers,” elected officials, and partisan media who amplify and encourage such false beliefs.
Perhaps you find that dynamic to be old news, and already imagined that digital disinformation spreads primarily from partisan media and elected officials down to a bunch of mid-level online “influencers” and then onward to the feeds of average people. That’s the typical, top-down way of things and the report does find this happening. In particular, it calls out former President Trump and his two mid-level influencer sons as enthusiastic participants in the top-down dissemination strategy. But perhaps more concerning, the Trumps were also enthusiastic participants in a reversed, bottom-up dynamic.
This less-noticed dynamic, in the report’s telling, begins relatively quietly with “individuals identifying real-world or one-off incidents and posting them to social media.” A case study in this phenomenon is “Sharpie-gate.” It began with someone’s confused but apparently genuine belief that Sharpie pens provided in Arizona’s Maricopa County were bleeding through ballots and leading—just as President Trump had predicted—to the “canceling” of some Trump voters’ ballots.
Certain elements of this story were true. The Sharpie pens bleeding through ballots, for example. But the alarming conclusion reached from those shards of truth was entirely false.
Maricopa County knew about the bleed-through phenomenon and was counting the ballots anyway. It tried to communicate this to the public. But by then it didn’t matter, because mid-level partisan influencers had grabbed hold of the false claims and, blaring them out as verified truth, were fomenting more acrimony and distrust while, at the same time, passing the “news” back up the chain to established conservative media outlets and politicians, who then broadcast the “news” back to average people, cocooning them in an echo chamber of homegrown misinformation that served to validate the dark suspicions they’d previously been primed to harbor.
This happened over and over in 2020, the report says. “Influencers and hyperpartisan media leveraged this grassroots content, assembling it into overarching narratives about fraud, and disseminating it across platforms to their large audiences. Mass media often picked up these stories after they had reached a critical mass of engagement.”
Through these and other “warped stories,” the report explains, “the meta-narrative of a ‘stolen election’ coalesced into the #StopTheSteal movement, encompassing many of the previous narratives. The narrative appeared across platforms and quickly inspired online organizing and offline protests, leading ultimately to the January 6 rally at the White House and the insurrection at the Capitol.”
There are a number of important recommendations in the report for how to begin dredging the toxic pollution from our information environment, including a government point-person on combatting online misinformation, new Congressional regulations, and more forceful and proactive actions from the large digital platforms that now serve as both powerful gatekeepers and primary vectors along which misinformation spreads.
But what I can’t shake is the memory of one of the report’s contributors, during that 90-minute presentation, appearing to be at a loss for ways to stop the bottom-up misinformation dynamic.
When misleading information originates not with sinister masterminds in high positions of power and influence, but instead is locally-grown by random people who misinterpret events around them because they’ve been primed to see plots against them everywhere, and then those genuine misunderstandings get amplified and validated by powerful people with an interest in perpetuating misunderstanding—well, where exactly in this closed circle of affirming, politically beneficial falsehoods does a trustworthy source try to enter with actual facts? What would a trustworthy source even be in such a context?
Some of the stories I’ve been reading this week:
• Tim Wu is joining the White House — “The appointment of Mr. Wu, 48, who is widely supported by progressive Democrats and antimonopoly groups, suggests that the administration plans to take on the size and influence of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google,” reports The New York Times.
• More problems with political ad bans — A Duke paper looks at what happened when Facebook and Google suddenly started restricting political ads late in the 2020 election season. The authors, like many others before them, faced challenges because of the “black box” that makes online political ad spending hard to assess.
• “I asked my staff to take a quick look” — Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who was on the House impeachment team that argued for Trump’s conviction in the Senate, had her aides compile House members’ social media comments before the Capitol insurrection. They show that Trump wasn’t the only one urging people to fight the election results.
• Meanwhile, in the audio-chat app Clubhouse —
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