Understanding Foreign Interference [pdf]
dhs.gov
dhs.gov
It wont. This tactic worked for the Tobacco industry in the seventies, it worked for the cola industry in 2006, and it continues to serve diligently for oil and energy companies during climate change. This model of disinformation has also helped spread measles throughout the developed world through the anti-vax movement.
The problem is American education. You cannot spend 40 years cutting public education to the bone and turning colleges into profit mills without some sort of brain-drain. We've arrived in 2020 with a nation of citizens that lack the capacity for intelligent argument and critical analysis of ideas. This is also in large part due to the nature of how we get our information, namely as a "bleeds and leads" info-tainment format where our opinions are cultivated as a product of either 0 or 1, red or blue, liberal or conservative. The american opinion is largely an accessory of corporate advertisement in 2019.
It’s not education. Marin county, one of the best educated counties in the country with high tertiary education, have one of the highest proportions of anti-vaxxers.
Misinformation isn’t countered with education. It’s countered with counter propaganda -i.e. it’s not in a facts and figures type of way for you to make up your mind by attentively and discerningly studying data. No, it’s someone else offering ready to eat counter propaganda.
Btw, I would have you reconsider your careless use of the word antivaxxers, if anything ask yourself why is it so heavily promoted in media and what biases it carries? Again, I'm not against vaccination, but there is a lot to investigate about the context of how it is carried out. Kinds of conservation chemicals, optimum schedule, frequency and side effects of all this. You will find there is still quite some debate around this from more scientifically minded doctors.
Schooling is an avenue into education, and while 19th century prussia has been an influence, so has been montessori, humboldt and the 20st and 21st century reserach into pedagogy.
As for your comments on antivaxxer, they are called antivaxxers because they are anti-vaccination, don't care about the actual problems and and don't respond to the actual arguments. Doctors and researchers will always debate how to make vaccines better, because of course they will, we want better vaccines. There is also debate about when we can get away without vaccination, e.g. in the case of rabies where the vaccine is time sensitive, or malaria, where it doesn't make sense for norwegians to get them unless they visit the tropics and so they can spare themselves the side effects (which are acknowledged and worked on, see before) and society the cost. What you will not find, at all, is any honest scientific debate about whether the default should be to vaccinate or not. I don't know if you meant to imply this, but Poe's law acts here: even if you didn't you gave the antivaxxers a smidgen of credibility, by saying "you will find debate" in a way which could imply "and that means antivaxxers have some reasonable positions". They don't.
See also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#Effectivenes...
and this table: https://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2017106/tables/1
The US spends more on public education than any OECD country other than Norway.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Americans are kind of morons; pretty sure it has nothing to do with the amount of money we spend on education.
If you think the US is a nation of dumbasses because of infotainment expenses and advertising, perhaps you have some evidence for this?
is there a reason why education spending in particular should be reported as a fraction of GDP? if you look at US military spending as a fraction of GDP, it's pretty unremarkable.
to me the numbers paint a pretty clear picture. the US already spends more to educate each student than most OECD countries. whatever the solution is to the problem, it's probably not to just throw more money at it.
Students are taught the usual math, english, science, and history. If you want to teach critical thinking and analysis, you're going to need to either displace one of the subject matter or retrain how and what teachers teach.
There isn't enough hours in the day to squeeze in another subject in between high stake exam training and overloading students with homework.
Money doesn't seem to be the constraining factor here. Political reform are needed, and so is the support framework for training teachers to teach in yet "unproven" methodology.
We should start asking more suggestive questions about that.
"Hey Apple? How many children did you get for banning Jones?"
Not that I believe he is a particular sane or selfless individual or that anything else he espouses is in any way correct, far from it. But if deplatforming comes to bite them in the ass, I welcome the hit below the belt at this point. Because they deserve it for their own greed.
I think we just found the popular whore house for people in high positions who don't take laws too serious. There are a lot of questions unanswered.
I have a feeling though that to make any real difference, it would take several of these in fairly quick succession, but hopefully I'm wrong about that.
The Russian story was probably just a story induced by the intelligence community to discredit a presidential candidate. Here we seem to have even less evidence compared to WMD in Iraq
On the other hand it would be quite understandable that people might get a little angry if they are told they just hold opinions because of Russia while subjected to all those nagging categorical imperatives that were common in the race before the election. The Russian story just doesn't make sense in the end, not because they wouldn't want to have that level of influence or from a lack of trying. But you could also have the view that executive organs have misbehaved in front of their own constitution. That is far more probable in my opinion.
There's tons of evidence of that, provided by both Facebook and Twitter. They did the same here in the UK.
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17990946/twitter-russian-trol...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46590890
However I do not believe the Russian propaganda was decisive in the election. Like most such propaganda it just went into the wash, but it did happen and did have an effect, not so much swaying the vote one way or the other but in terms of polarising opinion and poisoning the debate.
An attempt to sway opinion would be aimed at the centre, where the swing voters are. Russian propaganda is aimed squarely at the left and right wings trying to push them further apart.
This phrase "affiliated with" is interesting. I happen to have spent many hours following the string of unequivocally stated facts behind this story, particularly the Twitter based one. I have yet to find any claim on behalf of Twitter that these accounts _were_ Russian, as is reported in the media. The original and only unequivocal statement I have found from Twitter is that the accounts are _suspected to be_ Russian (based on I believe 3 attributes, each of which is spoofable).
Have you read anything more specific than I have, that you could provide a link to?
There are also a ton of variants of 4chan, namely in Europe and Russia. With this outlook, I am not at all surprised of a small group of Russians pooling their efforts into meddling with a US election, their actions catching the eye of a trigger-happy Russian official and receiving funding or support from said official.
The problem is bigger than that.
If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed. Perception is reality.
"Foreign influencers are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to inflame hot button issues in the United States. They don’t do this to win arguments; they want to see us divided."
I can think of a few domestic groups who seem to have been engaged in this very behavior, to great success, for many decades now.
But that's the thing, if people don't really know how much trolling, extremism, and disinformation is real vs. manufactured, Russian intelligence services have achieved their goal. People will argue over nothing, accuse others of being bots, and imagine new conspiracy theories based on the idea that foreign hands are meddling in things.
The goal is to sow chaos, so if people respond with hysteria, that still achieves the goal. Understanding and not reflexively reacting to trolling, regardless of the source, is what can blunt the influence of the behavior. If people are not even aware of the deliberate trolling attempts, it's less likely they'll be able to counter it, or at least ignore it.
This is speculation about a plausible narrative.
You do not know what the Russian intelligence services are doing. You have been _told_, repeatedly, across all forms of media, by state sponsored entities, corporate entities, and individuals affiliated with no one, that Russia _is_ doing a variety of things. This may be true, this may be not. You and I do not know, and I have yet to encounter a single organization that actually knows and can provide actual evidence, rather than plausible narratives.
> People will argue over nothing, accuse others of being bots, and imagine new conspiracy theories based on the idea that foreign hands are meddling in things.
You are absolutely correct.
> The goal is to sow chaos, so if people respond with hysteria, that still achieves the goal. Understanding and not reflexively reacting to trolling, regardless of the source, is what can blunt the influence of the behavior. If people are not even aware of the deliberate trolling attempts, it's less likely they'll be able to counter it, or at least ignore it.
This is a narrative, based on an advertised version of reality combined with the powerful ability of the human mind to imagine things so vividly, they are effectively indistinguishable from experienced reality. Think about it for a minute: how did you come to know what is _really_ going on? Trace back through your memory and make note of the evidence that is unequivocally factual, writing it down on a piece of paper as you go. You might be surprised what you come up with.
In conversations like these, I find it helpful to remember that the world is actually becoming a better place to live on, day by day, in spite of our best efforts to stifle that advance.
How is the pdf in any way blaming Russians for everything? The fact is that Russian intelligence services and affiliates are running disinformation operations against Americans and others.
Disinformation and propaganda efforts are part of Russia's Gerasimov Doctrine, which seeks to make use of a spectrum of unconventional methods to achieve geopolitical aims without necessarily using direct military action. It's fake news, it's amplification, it's human intelligence, it's online trolling, it's hacking, it's covert action.
Obviously trolling, hacking, and what not happen naturally on their own. But Russian intelligence services seek to amplify extremism and discord whenever possible. And they've been exploiting political and social strike for many, many decades.
The EU funds so many pro-democratic programs around the world, many have been especially focused in the Russian influence sphere. How have we been caught so completely off guard when our non-democratic adversaries started doing it to us?
/edit I didn't mean to put NGOs trying to spread democracy on par with staterun propaganda, I'm just wondering why noone saw it coming in time for our systems to prepare.
Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win.
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
A 1998 report from the Heritage Foundation about how the IMF was giving billions of dollars to Russia for free.
>There are anecdotal reports of judges being on retainer to law offices; of judges setting their bribe amount as a percentage of the claim; of lawyers paying for judges' office supplies because the government would not do so.
>The courts, moreover, lack the support structures to enforce their decisions and collect fines. Filling the vacuum left by the state, organized crime has come to play a major role in commercial dispute resolution and the enforcement of court rulings. Again, this was an important cause for the low level of foreign and domestic investment, as well as being a contributing factor in capital flight.
https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-p...
>The latest money-laundering scandal in New York confirms that the evil of organised crime is woven into Russian life—and that it is starting to infect the rest of the world
A better comparison would be US operations against the communist bloc during the Cold War. However... The US intelligence community has spent the last 25 years focusing on the Middle East. The previous generation of spies and counter-spies have mostly retired, and those who are still active haven't worried about the KGB in a long time. Meanwhile, the KGB has never gone away, and has been obsessed with the US the whole time. And now the former head of the KGB/FSB runs Russia... What we are dealing with is the same KGB playbook, with some 21st century upgrade. Russia knows US citizens better than they know themselves, which is how they managed to brainwash 1/3d of our population through domestic assets like Manafort, Barr, Mcconnell and of course the Trumps. It's no surprise that the are running circles around us at the moment. Hopefully our institutional immune system will kick in and we will adapt before the rot sets in too deep.
In Russian political discourse nowadays liberals are all too often accused of being on American embassy's payroll. You want this kind of talk in the US when opponents are labeled as foreign government shills?
I'm not going to argue that point, but the west does have Hollywood. I don't know of a counter-force to that sort of culture-export engine. It is a powerful piece in the propaganda picture.
Promoting democracy is taking a single issue and clearly sating “this is a good thing for everyone and here’s why”.
That is not what Russian “influencers” are doing. They by contrast can be seen arguing fervently on both sides of an argument.
Their goal is not to promote any particular idea but to destabilise both sides by encouraging extreme views in both and driving the factions to be more partisan.
Leaving aside how naive a statement like "the Chinese believe" is (you're talking about an ethnicity which clearly has multiple opinions on everything, just like any other group of people).
In democracies communists are free to say how great it is not having a choice of government and others are free to disagree.
The issue is not with the expression of opinion but with the expression of extremist falsehoods delivered on both sides of an argument with the only goal of causing instability.
Just like in a sales tabloid newspapers, truth is not important only the reaction. Ever notice how the retraction notices are so much less prominent than the original articles were?
Because it's non-ideological it doesn't even have to be consistent propaganda. It's pure wrecking. Sowing conflicting ideas works extremely well for that. And again it's taken advantage of pre-existing faultlines. There's no evidence that Alex Jones was a foreign provocateur - but if he was, would he have done anything differently?
Then there's the problem that our own "pro-democratic" propaganda always had a massive flaw in it. Democracy has lots of inter-related elements in it, but we pushed the "free market" ones far before the "rule of law" ones, and the "human rights" ones extremely weakly because human rights ideology hasn't actually been properly established in America either.
We pushed democracy into Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ended up with gangster capitalism there, and deemed it a success. Now they're re-exporting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_the...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Afr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Asi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Rus...
Though such enforcements are also not the best, then the tech companies are given too much power. Hard topic, but just asking people to be careful is never going to be enough, so much passion out there, people will reply. Or real discussion will be watered down when real people are called bots.
Time to time they do these "clean-ups", just to save face it feels like.
There are arguably legitimate reasons not to use your real name online, including "I don't wanna."
Why allow fake account pollution in bigger networks, that are affecting so much of our real life politics today? So much trolling and social engineering are being done through fake accounts, the best solution is a very harsh validation.
I think it is wildly accepted that major social networks are full of ghost and/or inactive accounts. If companies cracked down on those, everyone would see that their numbers are not accurate and their valuation would take a big hit. Some CEOs would lose their jobs for sure. So it is not in the big networks' self-interest to change that.
You could make a network from scratch, were identity is baked in from the start. But who would sign up? If Google+ thought us anything it's that people really hate giving their real names (and rightfully so, IMHO). Sure, some services managed it, but they are not as influential as the big ones.
So no new service has the network effects to pull it off, no big network wants to lose money on doing it, and users don't want it.
Anonymity is a hard requirement of free speech. Free speech is a hard requirement of democracy. Some topics can only be safely discussed under anonymity. Some opinions can only be expressed anonymously, especially today in the age of outrage cancel culture where angry mobs seek to shut down and de-platform any views they are opposed to.
Ultimately, de-platforming anonymous speech is a pretty heavy-handed form of censorship.
The tool to combat social media manipulation is education and promotion of critical thinking. Not censorship.
Problems arise when supposedly “real” identities misrepresent their actual identity, location, allegiance, etc. in a context where those things are expected to be trusted, and then abuse that trust.
Foreign manipulation only provides more fuel and maybe direct the flames where it's more suitable for the attacker.
Anyway, the medium is the message. Social media is just bad for mass communication. Attention economy is bad for meaningful discourse and thus bad for democracy.
I see that it’s time to link to this again:
https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...
In short: requiring “Real Names” is a really terrible idea.
What is going to keep coming up as an issue, is how actively social media companies want to police users and content. If you take a hands off approach, trolls and government influence ops will run rampant. But moderating is tricky business and you don't want to become a sort of digital police state.
Not to mention that it can be very difficult to combat fake news. Should Twitter and Facebook have fact-checking operations to prevent pernicious fake news from spreading? Consider that in Myanmar, propaganda spread on Facebook contributed to mass killings of Rohingya.
Lots of tough problems to tackle.