“Censorship through noise,” “a preference for narrative over truth,” micro-targeting using “psychographic profiling,” “untraceable whisper campaign[s] by text,” — these are some of the tactics and strategies being used right now to create paranoia, distrust of journalism and elections, and a sense of unreality among American voters.
McKay Coppins lays it all out in his article in the March Atlantic, “The 2020 Disinformation War.”
I urge you to read the entire article. I would have to go way beyond fair use to quote all of the pertinent descriptions and arguments.
What I hope to summarize in this diary is how this disinformation campaign works against not only those Trumpers we call mindless, clueless, “morons,” etc., but also against those of us who think reason and logic could make a difference in political discourse. In the few days since I first read the article, I have come across what looks like the effect that such a disinformation campaign has even on those of us who discuss politics in the relatively safe environment of Daily Kos. (I’ve commented in a couple of diaries about the Atlantic article, promising to write this diary).
Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that bots and/or trolls are taking over DK. I am suggesting that we Kossacks are being influenced by these tactics here and now, often without our realizing how insidious this campaign is. McKay examines only a few examples of combatting such a campaign and comes up with no surefire solution. Maybe —maybe — forewarned is fore-armed. Maybe we at Daily Kos could come up with some solutions that would work for individuals as well as campaign organizations.
Tactics of Disinformation
Coppins calls it “an alternate information ecosystem,” and says delving into rightwing Facebook groups, Twitter threads and Web sites had a surprising effect on him: “I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline.” (emphasis in the original)
The first tactic he describes is “censorship through noise” — bombarding FaceBook, web sites, email mailing lists, text threads with hundreds of slanted and false claims and “fake news,” to the point that the caveat “consider the source” becomes difficult. I don’t know about you, but I’m already being bombarded in my email inbox by an avalanche of requests for money — petitions and “surveys” that are thinly veiled requests for donations, screaming subject lines about the demise of some favored candidate or program (Social Security, food stamps, etc.), and frantic requests to “beat” a deadline. These might be mostly legitimate. But the effect is that I either don’t read them, or I delete them after a quick scan. And I don’t get many from the right wing. This general “noise” is having a damaging effect on political discourse in general. But the tRump campaign is taking it to new levels.
Coppin cites the rise of Brad Parscale from the 2016 Trump campaign’s digital information chief to head of the *president’s re-election campaign, and says Parscale “continues to show a preference for narrative over truth.” Parscale doesn’t have to create the narrative; he just takes tRump’s lies and sets them in plausible or attractive stories and packages them to be distributed widely.
Micro-targeting has been written about in many contexts, especially in complaints about cookies, companies sharing our personal information without our permission, and the annoyance of online ads tailored to our online behavior. The Repugnicans have weaponized the practice further by using psychographic profiles, Coppins says.
“The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.” (emphasis in the original)
Not only are “censorship through noise” and micro-targeting being used in Facebook and other social media, the R campaign is rolling out a work-around skirting federal regulations against robo-texting using “peer-to-peer” apps.:
… a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, … by clicking ‘Send’ one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.”
Since people open texts more readily than emails or phone calls or messages, Coppins says, being able to robotext anonymously allows “shady political actors” to easily “wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.”
The strategy I find most upsetting and scary is the attack on journalists and media organizations, using increasingly damaging technological ploys. “… pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier.” When an article critical of tRump appears, Don Jr. has a text thread to alert followers to the article and the writer.
Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up … [it is turned] into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media.
Targets of the Disinformation campaign.
Attacks on the news media are nothing new. What is new is the goal.
But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” [Breitbart editor Matthew] Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. ‘There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.’
On Daily Kos, Truthout, HuffPost and other alternative news sites, I still see swipes against “mainstream media.” But if we can’t trust the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, then maybe we can’t trust Mother Jones or The Atlantic either.
If we’re waiting for Edward R. Murrow to come on the air and call out today’s McCarthyism, we’re waiting in vain. Such a “voice calling in the wilderness” has already been all but silenced. Coppins quotes a member of the Trump campaign that “he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election.”
Destroying our faith in the integrity of the news media makes getting out the details of this disinformation campaign even more difficult. But that’s not even the worst of it. This disinformation campaign is yet another tactic for destroying Americans’ confidence in our elections.
Coppins cites last November’s Kentucky gubernatorial election, when confidence in the election results were threatened by a viral Twitter account falsely claiming to have destroyed Republican mail ballots. The bots that distributed the false claim were found to have originated in the United States. Coppins points out that such bots “can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.”
And it’s not just Twitter bots or text bots, mentioned earlier. The recent debacle of Iowa caucus results reporting is another example of bots (this time jamming phone lines that were supposed to collect caucus results) threatening public confidence in the caucus results, Democrats and election returns in general. I hope the lesson learned from the Iowa caucases is that the mainstream media, Democrats and everyone else should not be surprised at what lengths the Repugnicans will go to cheat to “win.”
So add to gerrymandering and voter list purges, a disinformation campaign that goes to the heart of the Democrats’ campaign to Get Out the Vote in 2020. Repugnicans will use whatever nasty trick they can pull off to discourage folks from voting for the truth and the general welfare. We have to be vigilant everywhere and always.
I found Coppins’ description of attempts to fight back against disinformation campaigns enabled by technology to be uninspiring at least. I’m calling on the Daily Kos community to take this disinformation campaign seriously and start discussing what we can do about it. It doesn’t matter if it’s being conducted by Russians or Republicans. Such technology-based disinformation campaigns could disenfranchise us without our ever noticing until it’s too late.
Coppins closes by quoting political theorist Hannah Arendt: “Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to ‘believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.’ “
What we are seeing, Coppins concludes, could be “not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.”
Yikes.
Thursday, Feb 13, 2020 · 7:38:55 PM +00:00
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lagibby
The New York Times has an article today about Michael Bloomberg paying for “memes” online. This whole “meme” thing is absolutely new to me. But it sounds like it could be one of the ways that Dems could counter the Trump disinformation campaign. (While, at the same time, maybe spreading a bit of muddled focus, if not disinformation.)