We're Doing Ai Generated Smear Campaigns Now
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Yale University has suspended a law school scholar after an AI-generated news website claimed that she was a member of a terrorist organization.
Helyeh Doutaghi, a well regarded international law scholar, has been working as the deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project at Yale Law School since 2023. The project promoted itself as fighting for “economic, racial and gender equality” and seemed to be aligned with Doutaghi’s progressive values. Doutaghi is an outspoken advocate for pro-Palestinian causes, and had supported Palestinian’s right to self governance in academic papers and public appearances.
On March 2, however, a shady AI-genetated fake news website called Jewish Onliner with ties to Israeli disinformation campaigns, ran a story claiming that Doutaghi was a member of “Samidoun,” a US-designated terror group. Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, is an international pro-Palestinian advocacy group, which the Treasury Department has claimed is a “sham charity” raising money for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Jewish Onliner is active on X and publishes a Substack newsletter, which it describes as “empowered by A.I. capabilities." In January, Haaretz reported that The Jewish Onliner has been engaged in AI bot activity on X and has ties to Act.il, a “well-known hasbara initiative based out of Reichman University (formerly known as IDC Herzliya) set up a number of years ago as part of Israel's battle against the BDS movement.”
Within 24 hours of the bogus AI story going up, Doutaghi was placed on leave by Yale. Her ID was disabled, her email account was revoked, and she was banned from campus. "I was only given a few hours notice to attend an interrogation based on far-right AI-generated allegations against me, while enduring a flood of online harassment, death threats, and abuse by Zionist trolls," Doutaghi posted on X.
"Rather than investigate the source of these allegations first, the nation's 'top law school' accepted them at face value and shifted the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused,” she posted.
Doutaghi says that she is not a member of Samidoun. She has attended events in support of Palestinian causes that it apparently sponsored, yet there appear to be no direct ties between her and the organization.
Doutaghi posted on X that authoritarians are "weaponiz[ing] AI to target students, faculty, and organizers who dare to speak out against genocide, systemic starvation, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” adding that this incident "marks a dangerous escalation in state repression-- one explicitly designed to foster an atmosphere of fear across university campuses.”
“It should cause profound concern to all defenders of free speech,” she said. Doutaghi’s lawyer also issued a statement saying that, “Yale is bending the knee to Trump's effort to surpress free speech, crush academic freedom, and establish a dictatorship.”
Doutaghi’s situation comes just days after ICE seized activist Mahmoud Khalil at his home at Columbia University for being involved in pro-Palestinian protests, despite the fact that he committed no crime. ICE refused to let Khalil speak to a lawyer for five days until a judge ordered it and his fate remains up in the air.
The State Department is also reportedly planning to use AI to scan social media and deport international students who express pro-Palestinian views. The program, called “Catch and Revoke,” will use AI to search and monitor the social media posts of 100,000 students here on visas, and will crawl through news footage to find out who is participating in pro-Palestenian protests.
The proliferation of LLMs will only make it easier and cheaper for extremists to launch multi-pronged disinformation campaigns against journalists, academics, and activists. As Gizmodo wrote, “Using AI to surveil and silence speech has long been raised as a boogeyman by privacy advocates—something that could happen, in theory. Now, it is actually happening, and anyone can be a target for anything they might say online. There is nothing good to come from that, especially when placed in the hands of fascist governments.”
These events represent a horrifying crack down on free speech and show why it is so crucial to fight to civil liberties right now. The fact that the government and authoritarian forces are increasingly seeking to monitor and restrict online speech is especially worrying.
As I’ve reported, the Democrats have been working overtime alongside the far right to strip anonymity from the web and censor speech on social media under the guise of “child safety.” It’s crucial that we all do everything we can to fight back against these dangerous efforts to dismantle civil liberties on the internet. I really want to keep covering on this issue, so please buy a yearly subscription to User Mag to support my reporting!
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A book you should buy and read right now
Speaking of free speech… in 1964, the Supreme Court passed a landmark case called The New York Times v Sullivan, that established the right to a free press by protecting the media against erroneous lawsuits. The ruling has been instrumental in allowing journalists to scrutinize public figures, powerful corporations, and political leaders without undue fear of litigation.
But now, that landmark decision is in jeopardy thanks to a coordinated right wing legal effort that's been decades in the making.
David Enrich's new book, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, reveals the coordinated efforts by powerful elites to challenge longstanding free speech protections and suppress dissenting voices.
David joined me on this week’s episode of Power User discuss the origins of this legal assault, its implications for investigative journalism in both new media and old, and what this all means for the future of free speech in America. I highly suggest buying his book right now! First week sales are crucial in a book’s success and this book is an excellent primer to the assaults on our first amendment rights. Plus it reads like a thriller. Buy it!!
User Mag is a 100% reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.
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