Sunstein and Vermeule proposed government infiltration of conspiracist groups

Evidence

This consideration lies behind a proposal by law professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule for reaching “hard-core” holders of false beliefs: they suggest infiltrating conspiracist groups. “Planting doubts” and “introducing beneficial cognitive diversity” is their prescription for repairing conspiracists’ “crippled epistemology.” Government, on this view, should attempt to “debias or disable its purveyors” in this fashion. Their proposal for a government-sponsored conspiracy to combat conspiracy recalls the efforts by J. Edgar Hoover, the founding director of the FBI, who ran a counterintelligence program from 1956 to 1971 that, among other illegal and improper techniques, infiltrated civil rights groups. Infiltrating conspiracist groups is a similar offense against civil liberties—especially when the group is not a terrorist cell or some other violent association. Today, like-minded people who create and spread conspiracist ideas form networks transformed by the revolution in communications technology. They are not groups in the sense of face-to-face associations, in contrast to the Montana militia, for instance, but are networks digitally dispersed across the world. Anyone is free to participate in the online discussions. But were the government to infiltrate such discussions (and we now see that this has indeed been done, including by a hostile foreign government, using a variety of camouflages), the effort would sooner or later be exposed. The result would be to fertilize and presumptively justify the very conspiracism it intends to combat. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 343

Categorization

• XREF: Sunstein’s nudge theory and ‘crippled epistemology’ connects to the earlier chapters’ epistemic reassurance and misconduct literatures. — connects to: Resisting conspiracism needs honest witnesses, not heroic martyrs — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 364
• QUESTION: Was any foreign-government infiltration of US conspiracist groups ever publicly confirmed in the way the passage gestures toward?