Mitigating Our Misery in a Sea of Misinformation
Do you hear me? Or do you fear me? - Beyoncé
It’s the year of the lie.
Beyond the usual background noise of corporate happy-talk, the increasingly vile music of illiberalism is rising on the airwaves of our lives. Its melodies and lyrics are tailored to match the life experiences and fantasies of specific segments of humanity. For those outside of its representations, emotions see-saw, speeding up until the hypnotic-like noises bring on lethargy and aloneness.
Once upon a time there was propaganda, external expressions seeking to convert the opposition. Then came misdirection, information designed to cause mistaken actions. Pavlov’s bell and dog experiments showed the world how behaviors could be taught.
As science brought insight into the workings of the human brain, psyops played upon demonstrable chemical neural reactions, seeking to redefine reality itself. The advent of instantaneous mass communication widened the horizons for those fiddling with our feelings.
In March, 2018 a consortium of news organizations published stories about the utilization of personal information and political inclinations of 87 million (mostly American) Facebook users to create profiles of voters suitable for use in propaganda.
It started with a lengthy psychology questionnaire hosted by Qualtrics, a company that manages online surveys. The first step for those filling out the questionnaire was to grant access to their Facebook profiles. Once they did, an app then harvested their data and that of their friends.
Cambridge Analytica took the information out Facebook’s back door (not literally) Palantir Technologies — an intelligence contractor founded by the Trump backer and tech investor Peter Thiel — helped Cambridge harvest Facebook data.
The first use of this stolen data and the profiles went back to 2014, when the ever hawkish John Bolton’s “super PAC” used early versions of this product, marking its first large-scale use in an American election.
Further investigation tied use of this data to the Brexit campaign that resulted in England’s departure from the European Union. Cambridge Analytica’s British affiliate, the SCL Group, engaged in discussions with executives from Lukoil, the Kremlin-linked oil giant, which was interested in the ways data was used to target American voters.
From the New York Times:
A voter deemed neurotic might be shown a gun-rights commercial featuring burglars breaking into a home, rather than a defense of the Second Amendment; political ads warning of the dangers posed by the Islamic State could be targeted directly at voters prone to anxiety, rather than wasted on those identified as optimistic.
“You can do things that you would not have dreamt of before,” said Alexander Polonsky, chief data scientist at Bloom, a consulting firm that offers “emotion analysis” of social networks and has worked with the center-right Republican Party in France.
“It goes beyond sharing information,” he added. “It’s sharing the thinking and the feeling behind this information, and that’s extremely powerful.”
Conclusive data on how psychological profiles were actually used by the Trump campaign (one advisor told the Times it was their “secret sauce”) and others has been scarce.
The ability to harvest and make practical use of personal data is no longer in doubt. Have you ever had a conversation about a product or service only to see ads appearing on the internet sites you visit a short time later?
Yo, internet dudes, I’m looking for a new French Press pot; think I can see anything beyond Amazon ads sometime soon?
Wanna see how the military’s recruiting propaganda spooks these days? Via SpyTalk:
With old black-and-white cartons overlaid over eerie music, a three-and-a-half minute video posted to YouTube by the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group feels more like a trailer for a horror film than the old “Be All You Can Be” recruiting commercials of yore. A headline about it over at Task & Purpose calls it “a master class in psychological operations” itself.
Now that scary movie time has concluded, let me tie today’s topic into domestic politics, starting with the right’s obsession with preventing support for Ukraine.
Heather Cox Richardson posted a Substack about the Institute for the Study of War report explaining that Russia’s only strategy for success in Ukraine is to win the disinformation war in which it is engaged.
This means that the strategy that matters most for the Kremlin is not the military strategy, but rather the spread of disinformation that causes the West to back away and allow Russia to win. That disinformation operation echoes the Russian practice of getting a population to believe in a false reality so that voters will cast their ballots for the party of oligarchs. In this case, in addition to seeding the idea that Ukraine cannot win and that the Russian invasion was justified, the Kremlin is exploiting divisions already roiling U.S. politics.
It is, for example, playing on the American opposition to sending our troops to fight “forever” wars, a dislike ingrained in the population since the Vietnam War. But the U.S. is not fighting in Ukraine. Ukrainians are asking only for money and matériel, and their war is not a proxy war—they are fighting for their own reasons—although their victory could well prevent U.S. engagement elsewhere in the future. The Kremlin is also playing on the idea that aid to Ukraine is too expensive as the U.S. faces large budget deficits, but the U.S. contribution to Ukraine’s war effort in 2023 was less than 0.5% of the defense budget.
Russian propaganda is also changing key Western concepts of war, suggesting, for example, that Ukrainian surrender will bring peace when, in fact, the end of fighting will simply take away Ukrainians’ ability to protect themselves against Russian violence. The authors note that Russia is using Americans’ regard for peace, life, American interests, freedom of debate, and responsible foreign relations against the U.S.
In the US, the New York Times reported on a spate of sites with ordinary sounding names like D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle, and the Miami Chronicle that “represent a technological leap in [Russia’s] efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers.”
Over the weekend the former President sent a message to his followers when he posted video of a Trump-adorned pickup with a tailgate image of our current president bound and gagged as though he’s been thrown into its bed. And the original video was shot by an aide in a Trump motorcade on Long Island.
Apparently during the drive to New York Dan Scavino shot and posted the video of the Truck. Trump found an image of another truck with the same tail-gate wrap around and added his own picture in front of it with a “Thumbs up.”
The image has been deleted from Trump’s Truth Social account.
Har, har, har. It’s all in good fun, right? Wrong.
Enough is enough. Joyce Vance thinks a judicial response would be appropriate:
This is a five-alarm fire. We know what the reaction would be if Joe Biden tweeted a photo of a bound and gagged Donald Trump in the trunk of an electric car. Why does Donald Trump get more leeway, especially with his past history? He only continues to get it because our institutions—the courts, the Republican party—let him take it.
One of the problems with Trump is that he goes right up to the line and then hovers on top of it in a way that gives him plausible deniability he hasn’t quite crossed over. That’s what he’s doing when he targets the Judge’s daughter in Manhattan, just like he targeted Judge Engoron’s law clerk, and just like his buddy Roger Stone quite literally targeted the Judge in his criminal case, posting a picture of her on Instagram in what looked like crosshairs. That’s what Trump did today, posting an image of a kidnapped President Biden while letting his followers put on the story it didn’t mean anything.
Actions have consequences. Judges have the ability to compel good behavior from defendants on bond pending trial in their court. They can go so far as taking away their guns once they’re indicted or prevent them from contacting and threatening witnesses and victims. They should tell him he can’t threaten the President of the United States. It’s time for the courts to stop bending over backward to protect Trump. He’s entitled to all the constitutional protections any other criminal defendant receives, but he’s not entitled to more.
Of course, Donald Trump needs to keep pulling these types of stunts to “own the libs” to keep his rallies coming. Hard times are upon the Republicans presumed nominee, court dates and crummy fundraising are cutting into his grift. Rallies, when he can pull them off, garner the unearned media he so desperately needs, as the press stands by and (mostly) blithely anxiously awaits whatever swill he’s dishing out that day.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, writing at Lucid, thinks now is the time to push back with rallies centered on opposing Trump. Historically, she points out that authoritarian leaders have won support by portraying themselves speaking to adoring crowds. Maybe it’s time Trump started getting a dose of his own medicine.
Trump devoted equal effort to spreading fear about the presence of bad crowds in America, with right-wing propagandists like Tucker Carlson of Fox News acting as his allies. Institutionalized racism had long ago created a double standard among police when dealing with crowds: a group of Black men probably meant gang activity, while a group of armed White men seemed unremarkable. Trump added a page from the autocratic playbook in labeling those who protested against police racism and brutality as terrorists, and in seeking to similarly brand leftist activists.
Trump is gone from the White House. Yet the current wave of state-level GOP-sponsored anti-protest legislation builds on his efforts to depict protesters as threats to the social order. A 2018 West Virginia law eliminated police liability for deaths caused when dispersing riots and “unlawful assemblies”; a February 2021 Oklahoma measure immunizes any drivers from criminal and civil charges if they "unintentionally" injure someone while "fleeing from a riot" and holding a "reasonable belief that they are in danger."
In between came two events that put the Republican Party into war mode. First, the Black Lives Matter protests, which were not merely the largest mass mobilizations in American history, but also 96% peaceful in nature. Second, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. This shock event - seemingly, a bad crowd action par excellence - liberated the GOP to be openly lawless. No wonder the party and its media allies have doubled down on its voter suppression agendas, alliances with White extremists, and false depictions of urban America as collapsing into anarchy.
Around the world, criminalizing dissent has justified the removal of the wrong kinds of crowds from public view. It is now America’s turn to stand up for democracy by protecting the right to peaceful assembly.
As much as I may disagree (why do I always have to say that?) with Liz Cheney, she had the right idea this week, in holding a pro-democracy rally in Iowa.
