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By Joshua Yaffa
In the summer of 2017, Nina Jankowicz, a 28-year-old American, ran for Kiev as communications adviser to ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a one-year Fulbright scholarship. Jankowicz interested in virtual international relations and the fight against misinformation that corresponded to a penchation for musical theater: in Washington, D. C. , where she lived for several years before moving to Ukraine, she played Sally in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” and Audrey in “The Little Shop of Horrors. “
Then, when he came to a Facebook page for a White House protest calling “resistance activists, spectators and karaoke fans,” his interest piqued. He then spoke to Ryan Clayton, a progressive organizer concerned about the protest. On the Fourth of July, a boy dressed in a vest and a three-sided hat took off. “Listen, listen, citizens, ” he said, ringing a bell. “. Protesters waving American flags performed musical numbers asking for Trump’s political judgment, adding”Do you hear other people sing?”The hymn of “The Miserables. “
Clayton told Jankowicz that he was inspired by participation. I suspected it had something to do with a last-minute Facebook message from a user named Helen Christopherson, who showed up to throw money to buy classified ads in exchange for admin access to the occasion page. “I earned about $80 from my ad account, so we may succeed in another 10,000 people in Washington,” the message reclassified ads. “That would be huge!” In fact, Christopherson’s advertising spending surpassed fifty-eight thousand other people in the Washington area.
It wasn’t until October of the following year that Jankowicz began to think about how the good luck of the occasion could have compatibility with a broader pattern. As a component of Congressional investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have released a series of classified ad purchases through the Internet Research Agency, the so-called “troll factory” in St. Petersburg. composed of classified loclasified ads of young Russians who campaigned on social media with false identities. “Helen Christopherson”, a Facebook alias used through one of them. In “Losing the Information War,” an interesting new book about incorrect information as a geopolitical strategy, Jankowicz writes: “In an absolutely unforeseen collision of my two wonderful loves, it seemed that Russia had armed transmissions.
The I. R. A. funded through Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman who has thrived with unpleasant responsibilities that the Kremlin needs but prefers not to do himself, such as hiring Internet trolls or deploying mercenary soldiers (at the beginning of the two thousand, his catering company organized official dinners, which earned him the nickname Putin’s leader). According to Mueller’s report, published in April 2019, teams and accounts created through the IRA “have reached tens of millions of people in the United States. “The White House might have been more comical than subversive, but it’s a revealing example of the IRA’s modus operandi: the troll factory has discovered “authentic local voices,” as Jankowicz says, to move Russia forward. “The state goal of fostering widespread distrust of government and democracy. “
Since the 2016 elections, the specter of Russia’s online interference has been amplified through our own anxiety. In “Madness and Glory,” Tim Weiner, the writer of the C. I. A. stories and the FBI, states that Russia has “deployed the strength of social media to reshape U. S. policy. “Illustration, Weiner Discusses a Conspiracy Theory, propagated through the IRA In 2015, U. S. Army training in Texas that year was part of an Obama management plot to confiscate firearms in the state. As the meme circulated, the governor of Texas spoke alarmingly about the training; So is Senator Ted Cruz. “The IRA had been put in the minds of some tough politicians and millions of voters,” Weiner writes. He warns that the good luck of Russia’s stealth and subversion “could if the United States will endure. “
The challenge in giving meaning to misinformation operations is to separate the intent from the impact. Prigozhin’s trolls might have aspired to distort American politics and disappoint American society, but to what extent did they succeed?The theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 through the Russian army Intelligence Hackers, and their upcoming release via WikiLeaks, seem to have had an effect on the electorate, this effect is difficult to measure. controlled trolls to achieve, however, was more diffuse and significantly less important. In 2016, they lit the hot spots of American discourse, then fled when the chimney broke out; his precedence seemed to be to mark problems with bosses and payers in Russia, as well as to influence real votes in the United States. The incorrect Russian information, and the cynical and distorted worldview it entails, is a challenge, but the nature of the challenge would be possibly not exactly what we imagine.
Jankowicz describes the manic quest for a non-authentic online activity as a slot game. Although deleting fake accounts and verifying their contents is a fundamental hygiene online, the effect may be limited. A 2017 Yale study found that “challenged” tagging of Facebook content increased the percentage of users who discovered it false by less than 4%. And by focusing on the tactics of the aggressors, we can improve our weaknesses as victims. “Unless we mitigate our own political polarization, our own internal problems, we will continue to be a simple target for any malicious actor,” Jankowicz writes. When the American public is full of fear, hatred, mistrust and exhaustion, it is not difficult for some trolls, whether in St. Petersburg or the White House, to agitate to turn one’s feelings into something even more toxic.
What if, to borrow an old trope from a horror movie, the call came from inside the house?Not long ago, I spoke to Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, a research framework that tracks Russian intelligence operations. Army unit provided by the anti-aircraft missile launcher that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014, and discovered the identities of Russian agents who poisoned Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, in 2018. Toler is involved in the Americans’ in April, in a Bellingcat column titled “How (not) to report incorrect Russian information” Toler questioned a Times article that had compiled a series of examples to show how “Putin has disseminated incorrect information in -Public aptitude issues for more than a decade. “The article faithful several paragraphs to a hard-to-understand online page called Russophile, which, Toler noted, has virtually no audience.
“It’s a challenge of scale,” he tells me. In fact, there is incorrect information produced through Russia; This spring, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russian-linked social media accounts promoted the theory that the virus was a biological weapon invented by the US military. America to harm China, but compared to, say, Fox News experts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, not to mention Trump himself, the perceived risk of Russian trolls far exceeds its real reach To what extent does Russia’s efforts to reinforce claims that mail voting leads to fraud are audible, let alone consistent , when the president launches the thesis?deafening volumes?
“The effect of a press convention or a Trump tweet on opinion-building, even behavior, can be monumental,” Toler said. In April, after Trump warned that disinfectant can be injected into the framework to treat COVID-19, fitness officials in several states reported spikes in calls to direct poisoning lines. Only one such facility in North Texas reported receiving approximately 50 calls about chlorine ingestion in the first 3 weeks of August alone. “The more than a few thousand Russian-led robot accounts can “Just get there,” Toler added, “is to get a trending hashtag on Twitter for a few hours. “
The spread of incorrect information is no stranger. The use of the Russian word dezinformatsia does not make the practice different from local lies spread online through Americans aimed at other Americans. What is the name of the spread of deception through members of a Facebook organization in Klamath?Falls, Oregon, a few days after George Floyd’s police killing, warned that Antifa militants were about to descend on the city, and two hundred more people came out with rifles and bulletproof vests to fight what turned out to be a ghost. Threat.
In July, the Times, which brought up US intelligence assessments, reported that several Internet sites linked to Russia had posted misleading or false stories about the coronavirus. The 3 sites in question had between them a few thousand online subscribers, which is not entirely insignificant, yet. The crickets oppose the fourteen million perspectives for a video that Trump retweeted the day the Times published his story. In the video, a number of fringe doctors with status on the steps of the Supreme Court falsely claim that no masks or closures they are mandatory to fight the pandemic If Russian agents had tried to insert such a meme into the American discourse, there would be no wonder how Putin seeks to kill us.
In many cases, the media’s reaction to Russian narratives has the effect of extending their success beyond anything they can simply by themselves. A tweet quoted through the Times in April amassed a large total of one retweet and two likes. , “the little groan of incorrect information becomes something much more powerful and dangerous. “And instiling this sense of danger is exactly the goal of incorrect information.
Media organizations are not the only culprits when it comes to focusing on the threat or increasing the danger posed by those threats. In early June, amid growing protests across the country following the death of George Floyd, Susan Rice, a former United Nations ambassador and national security adviser to the Obama administration, spoke on CNN about her suspicions that “foreign actors” were seeking to hijack protests to escalate tensions, adding, “This is directly out of the Russian playbook. “The appeal of the story was widely shared: Attorney General William Barr also blamed the “foreign actors” for looting and violence. Foreign interference is now a trope in U. S. politics, with the threat of being as reasonable and meaningless as the term “fake news. “have once become co-opted through Trump.
These outward-guided operations exist, but exaggerating their prevalence and strength ends up eroding the concept of a real bottom-up protest, in a way that, ironically, is entirely consistent with Putin’s conspiratorial world view. by far what is ugly and false in our politics. When the immune formula overreacts to a foreign pathogen, the result is possibly more harmful to the host than the pathogen itself.
In the years after the 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik secret police spread rumors about a false pro-Tsarist underground resistance movement, which aimed to manipulate migrant leaders into abandoning their efforts to overthrow the nascent Soviet regime by convincing them that the false underground movement These tricks are known as “active measures” and have temporarily become an essential component of Cold War aggression. For a century, Soviet intelligence supported Western protest movements that leaders did not know benefited from KGBsupport, and transmitted false and valid secret data to activists and journalists, who were eager for sensational scoop. These operations have become the kind of disdain crusade that Russia is achieving today.
In an encyclopedic and readable history of the subject, “Active Measures”, Thomas Rid, a politologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, explains that “what made an active measure active was . . . if it resonated with emotions, with shared criticism in the target community, and if it managed to exacerbate existing tensions. To “activate” anything, we had to deal with the pre-existing trends and pathologies of society: disaffection, inequality, prejudice, aggression.
Rid tells a postwar Moscow story that shows how activation works. In the late 1950s, as a component of an experiment to test the effectiveness of these techniques, Ivan Agayants, the founding director of K. G. B. D descomponentment, which oversaw disinformation operations, sent several agents to an open-air village in Moscow. Its purpose was to fuel anti-Semitism; they beat Jewish tombstones and painted stikas around the city. The vast majority of citizens were surprised and frightened, but a small number were encouraged to take anti-Semitic measures. Inspired by this success, K. G. B. the provocate provocateen used similar movements to incite local neo-Nazis in West Germany, with the aim of discrediting postwar leaders by suggesting that the West is inhospit to Jews.
The fundamentals of democracy can increase vulnerability to such misinformation: a lax press and a culture of open debate allow conspiracy theories to flourish and destructive concepts to combine with virtuous concepts. How, then, to respond? The democratic establishments have the acceptance as true of citizens who emphasize a factual universe. “Active measures erode that order,” Rid writes, “but they do so slowly and subtly, like melting ice. ” However, trying to close the doors through which misinformation enters can have its own negative effects. At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in 1980, John Ashbrook, a hawk congressman from Ohio, suggested to John McMahon, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, that he take more competitive measures in opposition to the teams on the front lines. With the support of the Soviets in the United States. Array McMahon replied, “I will have to point out that the Communist Party is a very legal establishment in the United States. ” As Rid points out, “overreacting to active measures ran the risk of turning an open society into a more closed one. ” With the complexity of technology, a balanced reaction has become more difficult.
It is worth remembering that the Americans have also been experts in what Rid describes as “secret and truthful revelations, forgeries, and outright subversion of the adversary. ” The practice grew out of a memorandum – “Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” – written in 1948 by George Kennan, diplomat and intellectual architect of American policy toward the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War. Throughout the 1950s, the C. I. A. financed the publication of gossip magazines, tabloids and music aimed at the East German public, which combined ideological content and genuine fabrications at more risk-free rates. A 1965 American bestseller, “The Penkovsky Papers,” apparently the memoirs of a Soviet intelligence officer turned American spy, was a C. I. A. forgery. This raised the question of who, exactly, had been fooled: the Soviet state or the American public? As the Polish-British journalist Víctor Zorza pointed out at the time, democracies “suffer the serious disadvantage that, in trying to harm the adversary, they will also have to lie to their own public. ” Disinformation cannot be targeted precisely: to release a lie globally is to lose its trajectory and impact.
In the waning years of the Cold War, the United States had largely withdrawn from the boldest bureaucracy in political warfare, at least in the opposite direction from the Soviet Union, but Moscow continued to produce lies and half-truths. Known as the active KGBLa measure of this era, and maximum resonance today with what the World Health Organization calls the “infodemic” surrounding COVID-19, a disinformation crusade known as Operation Denver. The KGB, along with the East German Stasi, propagated bogus clinical studies and planted press reports to recommend that HIV did not leap from primates to humans in Africa, but was ready in a US Army laboratory. at Fort Detrick, Maryland. In 1987, a Moscow Associated Press article caught the attention of a television manufacturer in New York, and the Fort Detrick theory has become the subject of a credulous dan Rather report in the “CBS Evening News. “
It is highly unlikely to quantify the effect of Operation Denver, however, many studies over the years have shown that those who do not believe in the science of HIV origins. They are less likely to have safe sex or take recommended medications if they are infected. And the theory turned out to have an extremely long and persistent life. In the 2005 song “Heard ‘Em Say,” Kanye West raps: “I know the government is administering AIDS. “Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa from 1999 to 2008, has continually questioned the clinical basis for HIV infection. and the AIDS epidemic, which brings up fort Detrick’s conspiracy, among other discredited thesis. As a result, South Africa has delayed the large-scale implementation of antiretroviral therapy by 3 hundred and thirty thousand lives.
But Rid points out that in the United States, the loudest propagators of the concept that HIV had American origins were gay rights activists and the African-American press, communities that did not want the KGB to convince them that their own government could simply treat their loved ones. In the early 1980s, Reagan’s leadership was not absolutely valued on the virus’s history in homosexuals. Americans as involuntary guinea pigs in secret medical experiments.
Indeed, when we judge the effect of fashion misinformation, “the difference between domestic and foreign is outdated,” said Marietje Schaake, a former Dutch MEP for the Netherlands and director of foreign policy at Stanford University. meme has begun to travel from one online platform to another, it is highly unlikely to identify its origins; more vital is how a target population responds.
Weiner documents how “IRA surprise troops,” as he calls them, “connected with at least 126 million Americans on Facebook, 20 million other people on Instagram and 1. 4 million on Twitter. ” But those ghastly numbers don’t tell us much. “The peak of the topics is not the number of other people exposed to a message, or even convinced through a message and having replaced their habit as a result, but they have an effect on the replacement of that habit,” Schaake told me. . The fact that throughout 2016, various Black Lives Matter activists met with I. R. A. The content, adding a social media crusade called Blacktivist, did little to replace the movement’s content, goals, or broader influence. (This appears to be the case with more recent IRA fronts like Peace Data, a difficult-to-understand site that has manipulated issues and arguments already prevalent in American left-wing circles. ) Rather, Schaake referred to anti-vaccination propaganda. Array: “Now, if even 2% of parents prevent their children from being vaccinated, it can have a very large effect on the fitness of the network as a whole. “
As for COVID-19, the obvious result of the combined disinformation crusade through Trump and Fox News is devastating. A discussion paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research in May analyzed the un nameless location knowledge of millions of cell phones to show citizens’ zip code. with a superior Fox News audience, they were less likely to stick to the house’s orders. Another study, conducted through economists at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, warned of a disparity in fitness outcomes between the spaces where the Fox News audience most commonly connected to Tucker Carlson, who, among Fox presenters, spoke early and with relative urgency about the danger of COVID-19, and where the audience liked Sean HannityArray , who spent weeks minimizing his severity. Economists found that in March, Hannity’s audience on Carlson, in the places they studied, related to a 32% increase in infections and a 23% increase in COVID-19-related deaths.
Since the Cold War, propaganda has moved in the opposite direction to the maximum of other weapons of war: it has become more diffuse and indiscriminate, not less. As Peter Pomerantsev writes in “This Is Not Propaganda,” a vivid and insightful tour of how virtual they do to our minds and society, the architects of Operation Denver have made regular efforts (investment radio programs, journalists’ courtship, distribution of prospective clinical studies) to “make the elaborate lie a reality. “Today, misinformation tactics require much less work: the false statements of the Russian state media, says pomerantsev, “simply launched online or spit on television shows, more to confuse than to convince, or to substantiate the phobias of the public predisposed to see American conspiracies around them.
A significant number of US media outlets have taken much of the same approach, not because Russia has taught them how to do it, just because such narrative techniques are effective, talking about the sense of anxiety and disorientation that many data consumers feel. monologue that attacked the perception of journalistic objectivity. Did the media investigate Barack Obama’s ties to a former national terrorist?What about his affinity for the supposedly anti-American theology of black liberation?And where did the press when Hillary Clinton lied about the deaths of American diplomats in Benghazi?What about all the legislation you violated when maintaining a personal email server?”The effect of such a long list, where some of the accusations are serious, others false, very questionable and none have been explored, is to leave the brain exhausted and confused,” Pomerantsev writes.
While many facets of the art of misinformation remain the same (fake documents, plant leaks, fake experts), there are differences between cold war-era misinformation and its fashion counterpart. Continuity of tactics does not necessarily amount to the continuity of the strategy. Putinism, to the extent that it exists as a coherent system, is largely defensive. He sees Russia continually battered and conspired through Western powers and needs to keep those enemies at bay, not remake them in his image. (Weiner ignores this key difference when he declares Putin Stalin’s “true heir. “The disinformation aims to annoy and disorient an opponent, creating widespread distraction and noise, freeing the Russian state to act unheared. Something similar can be said of trumpism, some other incoherent political phenomenon, which above all needs to escape the heavy constraints of values, norms and institutions.
Perhaps the ultimate significant replacement has been the role and availability of the data itself. In a 2017 article titled “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?”Columbia law professor Tim Wu wrote that “it is no longer speech itself that is scarce, but the attention of listeners” Array In the 20th century, the greatest risk to the state’s crackdown on freedom of expression. This style “presupposes a data-deficient world,” Wu wrote. But now a multitude of online media has led to a lot of conversations. And this “cheap speech,” as Wu said, “can be used to attack, harass, and silence as much as to enlighten or debate. “The perception of a growing discourse to conquer misinformed or malicious discourse is outdated. In fact, the opposite is true: the difference between “good” and “bad” speech is lost amid the avalanche of data.
So the Kremlin doesn’t have to hack anything; Simply gently shake the data jar. Or let others think that’s the case. Pomerantsev writes: “Kremlin leaders are intelligent in the elements of the game of this new era, or at least they are smart to make everyone say how smart they are, which can be the most vital thing of all. “Rid makes it clear: “Saying where an operation ended, and whether it failed or succeeded, requires more than facts; this requires judgment, which in practice means a political decision, a collective decision. In this sense, the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 US election were in fact a success, regardless of the number of votes affected through active measures of Russian origin. If the purpose is disruption and confusion, then being perceived as affecting the effects is as smart as actually affecting the effects.
Concern over Russian “proactive measures” has led to government projects, think tanks and online researchers, all for troll accounts in the corners and parts of the Internet. Jankowicz, in his book, visits several such think tanks in Central and East. Europe: notes that it encountered Russian interference of all kinds earlier and with more intensity than elsewhere, adding the United States. He points out that these projects produce mixed results, but a coherence emerges: The Kremlin’s good fortune in injecting harmful, false or manipulated data into public discourse is secondary to the political temperament and cultures of the countries themselves.
In Poland, the right-wing Law and Justice Party, known as piS, came to force in 2015 at a time of deep distrust: in 2010, a plane crash killed ninety-six people, President Lech Kaczynski added. He founded the Party with his double brother, Jarosaw, who remained in command and spread the conspiracy theory that the turn of fate was not a turn of fate. Although the theory might have gained a useful touch from Russia, it was a toxin, propagated and kept alive through the PiS. Several organizations have been set up in Poland to combat incorrect information, but, as Jankowicz points out, they are reluctant to address national problems; instead, they focus on external threats, even if they are minor. As an opposition journalist comments on PiS leaders, “Why would they have to fight the wrong information when they do it themselves?”
When establishments are captured through an interested ruling party, incorrect information begins to resemble both a symptom of democratic decline and its cause. After consolidating his power, the PiS filled the Polish Constitutional Court with loyalies and took over the country’s main public broadcaster. In the end, a national authoritarian figure can inflict far more damage on a democratic formula than a remote author. Even Weiner, who is alarmist about the Kremlin’s covert interference danger, notes that Trump, at the end of his first term, “had completed what three-quarters of a century of active Russian measures had left unresolved. “
Pomerantsev describes our current situation of uncertainty and mutual mistrust as “the wonderful Tsimtsum,” a term that he borrows from the art critic and philosopher Boris Groys, who derived the concept from Kabbalah. In the original tale of the legend, God withdraws from the global he creates, leaving a void. Groys returned to the concept as a way to explain the void left by the collapse of communism in the early 1990s: an “infinite area of symptoms emptied of meaning. ” However, it turns out that it wasn’t just the attrition aspect of the Cold War that the Great Tsimtsum account had to face. Its victors in the West are now experiencing something similar, a time when “what was once pervasive has dissolved, and there is a race to shape new identities outside the mainstream,” as Pomerantsev puts it. In this new and disorienting reality, “the fact is unknowable, the long term dissolves into an unsightly nostalgia, the conspiracy replaces the ideology, the facts amount to lies, the verbal exchange turns into mutual accusations that each and everyone of the arguments are only “a war of transformation, and the feeling that each and every one of the things that are under our feet are constantly moving, inherently unstable, liquid.
It is tempting to think that the way out of this jam is to win the data wars, that the challenge is a public relations political challenge, that a broader message would protect Western societies from foreign misdeeds. But Jankowicz is rightly skeptical that “if the West can also simply tell a more compelling, more strategic and better coordinated story, we can also simply fight the wrong state-sponsored data as the content produced in Russia. “The genuine solution lies in the progress of a more receptive, credible and fair society and policy In order to achieve this goal, it would possibly be mandatory to pay attention to those who are sensitive to, rather than mocking, and discarding it. “While the resulting reviews would possibly disgust the viewer,” Jankowicz says, “their origins are valid and deserve to be taken into account. “
It also welcomes the style of Finland, which has been teaching media literacy in public schools for decades; Four years ago, a revised curriculum was introduced to teach all students in the best schools to identify false stories and perceive which data resources to trust. In contrast, civics education in American schools has declined in recent decades; In 2016, only 23% of eighth grade students achieved a proficiency point equivalent or higher on a national civics exam. If you don’t know how the government really works, you most likely agree with conspiratorial versions of their actions. While Twitter and Facebook have become more active in suppressing or reporting bad data, the inflammatory and divisive content is too imperative to their business styles for them to remove it entirely. And even decisive congressional action on this issue, which has so far proven reluctant, would not fix the even deeper cracks caused by partisanship, media echo chambers, racial and economic inequalities, and distrust in politics. , the dirty waters in which contempt feeds. and locate new hosts.
In 1946, Kennan, who coined the perception of “political warfare,” visited the code room of the Moscow embassy to reflect on how to counter the geopolitical risk of communism. The Kremlin obviously had wonderful ambitions to infiltrate and weaken the Western order, and abundant resources to devote to this task. How to fight more productively against these efforts? His letter, known as the “Long Telegram,” is a key document in the canon of American foreign policy. “It all depends on the fitness and vipassr of our own society,” he wrote to his bosses in Washington, likening the Kremlin and its ideologues to an “evil parasite that feeds only on diseased tissue. ” As such, he continued, “any courageous and incisive step to resolve the internal disorders of our own society, to the self-confidence, discipline, morale and network spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes. and joint launches. If we cannot let fatalism and indifference to the shortcomings of our own society pass, Moscow will benefit. Perhaps the most productive defense against active measures is a bit of our own activism. ♦
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