Amid a busy news day Monday, a familiar figure was named Chief Operating Officer of National Public Radio. Ryan Merkley, who directed the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder and also appeared in the Twitter Files as Wikimedia’s liaison to “Industry Meetings” with federal law enforcement, was elevated to the job by NPR president/Titania McGrath clone Katherine Maher.
“Throughout his career Ryan has demonstrated a commitment to the public trust, leading organizations that prioritize universal access to the common good,” Maher said. Maher, perhaps best-known for describing the First Amendment as the “number one challenge” that makes it “tricky” to remove content.
Merkley’s name figured in several high-profile efforts to control “disinformation” through aggressive content moderation. In 2021, the Aspen Institute created a Commission on Information Disorder, whose big-name participants included Katie Couric, “Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex,” and DHS official Chris Krebs. Merkley was the Commission’s Director.
The group’s never-published draft report, found in the Twitter Files and appended below, contained a series of hair-raising proposals, including:
creation of content “holding areas,” into which “influencers with repeat bad behavior” would be placed for “manual moderation and scrutiny”;
use of “demonetization” to “remove access to product features for violative behavior”;
establishment of an organization dedicated to “misinformation countermeasures” to be funded “by general taxes, voluntary investment from tech companies, taxes on social media ads, the allocation of FTC fines, or other appropriate means.”
The aim was to emphasize increased “accountability” for platforms that didn’t crack down on misinformation from “uninformed and disconnected centers of power.” It recommended use of public and private authority to correct current and historical misinformation, like “misrepresentation of Indigenous genocide” and “gender injustice of all kinds.” Its ideas were far-out enough that former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov resigned from the Commission, saying some of the recommendations recalled an approach that was “common practice in the USSR.” Kasparov’s resignation letter was addressed to Merkley:
Merkley in the fall of 2020 was Chief of Staff at Wikimedia, under then-CEO Maher. It was Merkley’s name, not Maher’s, that appeared in Twitter Files emails about the setup of a regular “Industry Meeting” on election content that involved the FBI and DHS as well as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Wikimedia and other firms. Emails showed Merkley asking Twitter’s Yoel Roth for an FBI contact number, and volunteering for a Signal group for industry reps and feds.
There are also exchanges showing Merkley in a group of industry reps who became signatories to a joint statement on misinformation. When Facebook was later investigated by Jim Jordan’s Weaponization of Government Committee, emails were produced showing Wikimedia was one of a handful of companies warned in advance by federal authorities about a “hack-and-leak” story due to come out that would “undermine the election conversation”:
Notable also: Aspen Digital, where Merkley was the Senior Technology Fellow, held a “hack and leak roundtable” to prepare for the Burisma story as far back as June of 2020, months before the story came out in the New York Post. Merkley was not listed among the exercise participants, however.
Merkley has yet to respond to a request for comment.
Digital censorship years ago expanded beyond removing content, as key actors saw opportunities to promote political objectives like correcting historical injustices or advancing diversity goals by expanding the definition of “misinformation.” NPR has long been an outlet in alignment with Aspen ideas, which became clear when former business editor Uri Berliner last April penned a whistleblowing essay in The Free Press. Beliner pointed among other things to NPR’s statement about the Hunter Biden laptop story: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”
It may be that these moves become moot shortly, but they’re worth pointing out nonetheless. The Commission’s draft report can be found here.
