Expose covert sources of false propaganda.
- The best propaganda is that which does not disclose itself as propaganda, but masquerades as news. [1]
- The propagandist strives to appear “reliable, trustworthy and credible” to the target audience. [2]
Fake news. Alternate facts. “You decide.” “I heard it from a reliable source.”
To reveal a speaker as a liar is normally sufficient to damage or destroys their credibility in the minds of his audience. In this regard Donald Trump is an anomaly. He has been revealed as a liar many thousands of times, yet in the minds of his “base” – his “true believers” – he is still credible. One of his few truthful campaign statements – which incidentally insulted the intelligence of his 'base' – was when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok? It’s, like, incredible.” [3]
Why his base feels that way still mystifies people. Perhaps it’s not that complicated. Written over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle’s Rhetoric says that rhetoric “is the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” According to Aristotle, these means are three:
- Ethos: the perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and reliability of the speaker.
- Pathos: the appeal to the audience's most basic and deeply held beliefs.
- Logos: the appeal of evidence; finding compelling reason for your audience to accept your argument or solution.
Trump makes up his own evidence, which may be emotionally compelling while lacking any factual or logical support. To his detractors and many of his supporters, he has no credibility whatsoever. Thus Logos and Ethos have already defenestrated. All that’s left is Pathos, the appeal to his audience’s most basic and deeply held beliefs and emotions. Among them, these are primary: fear, anger and schadenfreude (the pleasure derived from observing another person's misfortune). Fundamentally, his fearful and angry audience wants to see others suffer, most likely because they too are already emotionally suffering, although they may not acknowledge it. Trump promises his followers that when making others suffer their own suffering will ease. An apt image is the Roman Coliseum crowd calling for blood, calling for the emperor to turn his thumb down on gladiatorial losers, or to feed Christians to the lions. That Trump’s base now calling for blood is composed primarily of self-identified Christians is a deep irony, lost on no one save the Christians themselves who somehow have not yet noticed it. This sadistic desire to make others suffer is pathological. Perhaps America has an unacknowledged mental health crisis on its hands.
Russian Social Network Web Brigades, Bots and Trolls
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) near St. Petersburg, Russia, is widely recognized as a “troll farm.” From its employees come hundreds of millions of ads, tweets, Instagrams, YouTube videos, “bot” postings (automatic robot reposting/recycling of messages), Facebook postings, pages and accounts, all designed to create fake news reports, attack “enemies” of Russia and Putin both internal and external, and create chaos and political instability around the world. These "Web brigades" are documented as far back as an April, 2003 Vestnik Online article. [4]
In 2013, Russian reporters found 400 people working at the troll farm. Young people were hired to be "Internet operators," paid to write pro-Kremlin and anti-U.S. postings and comments. Each commenter had to write at least 100 comments per day. Other workers wrote four postings per day; these were distributed to yet other employees for wide posting onto social networks. [5]
On October 31, 2017, Fortune.com reported the following: [6]
- 126 million American Facebook users reached by Russian IRA trolls over the previous several years.
- 2,700 IRA Twitter accounts put out 131,000 Twitter messages during Sept – Nov 2016.
- 36,000 additional IRA bots produced 1.4 million tweets for the same period, viewed around 288 million times.
- Google discovered 18 YouTube channels created by IRA trolls which produced over 1100 YouTube videos.
- 80,000 ads reached 29 million American Facebook users who likely shared them with tens of millions more users.
- Facebook deleted over 170 accounts created by IRA trolls, responsible for over 120,000 Instagram messages.
On July 19, 2018, TheStreet.com reported the following: [7]
- By April 2018, Facebook had removed 270 IRA pages and accounts. According to Mark Zukerberg, IRA “had set up a network of hundreds of fake accounts to spread divisive content and interfere in the US presidential election."
- By April 2018 Facebook had removed 30,000 fake accounts based in France leading up to the French 2017 presidential election.
- During the 4th quarter of 2017, Twitter suspended 58 million suspicious accounts, identified as inauthentic, inactive or spam users.
- More recently, Twitter locked millions of accounts determined to be suspicious. This caused sizable follower drops of many high-profile users such as Katy Perry, President Trump and even Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey.
- In June 2018, the Alliance for Securing Democracy reported there were at least 3,800 Twitter accounts connected to the IRA. The Alliance tracks hundreds of other accounts linked to Russian influence operations, identifying tens of thousands per day that include "content attacking the U.S. and Europe, conspiracy theories and disinformation."
- In May, Facebook's VP of product management Guy Rosen wrote in a blog post that it had disabled 583 million fake accounts in Q1 of 2018, mostly "within minutes of being created." But it didn't specify how many active accounts have been suspended. In a May financial filing, however, Facebook estimated that 3-4% of its monthly active users (MAUs) were fake accounts as of Q4 2017, while as many as 10% of users were 'duplicate' accounts -- defined as "one that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account."
- As many as 9.5% - 100 million users – of Instagram’s over one billion users are bots, according to security firm Ghost Data as reported by The Information.
America is just beginning to identify the sources of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of political messages, written by those who consider us to be their enemies, and who would like nothing more than to throw our country, and others, into chaos. Not only has President Trump done nothing to fight this problem, he is actively adding to the problem with his continual lying and attacks on our intelligence services and others who fight this tsunami of lies. Knowing that the Russian Troll Farm – the Russian Internet Research Agency – worked very hard to undermine Trump’s 2016 political opponents and to get Trump elected, it makes perfect sense for him to behave this way. The loyal dog does not bite the hand that feeds it.
This is the seventh installment in our series on counterpropaganda.
Our Daily Kos blog reports:
The Nine Principles of Propaganda begins HERE.
Trump - Our Psychopathic President begins HERE.
Double-sided PDF copies:
The Nine Principles of Propaganda and Counterpropaganda — HERE.
The Twelve Criteria of Psychopathy — HERE.
The Forty Most Common Logical Fallacies — HERE.
THE NINE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF COUNTERPROPAGANDA
Propaganda is the backdoor hack into your mind
#1 Truth — Honest opposition is practical, moral, and unbiased.
#2 Focus — Address only one or at most two points.
#3 Clarity — Easily understood without further explanation.
#4 Resonate — Identify audience’s existing sentiments, opinions, and stereotypes that influence their perspectives, beliefs, and actions.
#5 Respond — Lies not immediately refuted become the audience’s truth.
#6 Investigate — Collect and analyze their propaganda to understand their message, target audience & objectives.
#7 Source — Expose covert sources of false propaganda.
#8 Reason – Expose their logical fallacies. Human cognitive biases for rapid thought response make us vulnerable to faulty reasoning.
#9 Disseminate — Share exposed propaganda with audiences not targeted; they can then recognize the lies and reciprocate.
Citations
1. Carlson, Oliver. "Handbook on propaganda for the alert citizen" (purchase portal). Studies of the Foundation for Social Research. 2 (1). Cited by Wikipedia – Counterpropaganda. Retrieved 1/17/19 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpropaganda#Reveal_true_origin_of_propaganda
2. Originates in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Cited by McDonald, Andy, and Palmer, Lene. (2003 Fall). "Propaganda - archived copy". Cited in turn by Wikipedia – Counterpropaganda. Retrieved 1/17/19 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpropaganda#Reveal_true_origin_of_propaganda
3. Lacapria, Kim. (2016 Jan 24). “Donald Trump ‘Fifth Avenue’ Comment, Snopes.com. Retrieved 1-17-19 from: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-fifth-avenue-comment/
4. Polyanskaya, Anna, Krivov, Andrei and Lomko, Ivan. (2003 Apr 30). [In Russian] “Virtual Eye of the Big Brother," Vestnik Online. Polyanskaya is a former assistant to assassinated Russian politician Galina Starovoitova. Cited by Wikipedia – Russian Web Brigades. Retrieved 1/17/19 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades#Background
5. Chernov, Sergey. (2013 Sep 18). "Internet Troll Operation Uncovered in St. Petersburg" [link now takes you to The Moscow Times], The St. Petersburg Times. Cited by Wikipedia – Russian Web Brigades. Retrieved 1/17/19 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades#Background
6. Meyer, David. (2017 Oct 31). Facebook, Google and Twitter Reveal How Many People Saw Russia-linked Posts, Fortune. Retrieved 1-17-19 from: http://fortune.com/2017/10/31/russia-ads-facebook-twitter-google-congress/
7. Gaus, Annie. (2018 Jul 19). Facebook and Twitter Face a Reckoning on Russian Trolls and Bots, The Street. Retrieved 1-17-19 from: https://www.thestreet.com/technology/facebook-twitter-face-reckoning-on-russian-trolls-bots-14655492