The Internet of Fakes — PR Tactics, Troll Farms, Sock Puppets, Botnets, Influencers, Operatives, & Chaos Agents.
A collection of evidence of persuasion, advertising, sales, target marketing, propaganda, agent provocateurs, and cognitive warfare - the true reality of the media landscape.
The media landscape is an information battlefield, and particularly the social media landscape. It is filled with PR, advertising, targeted marketing, propaganda, high pressure sales, and influence operations. This is documented fact, supported by evidence, with a financial ecosystem, well funded by corporations, state actors, and a plethora of business people, big billionaires, and tycoons. It’s very deliberate. It’s not a conspiracy theory nor paranoia, it’s an openly admitted reality. All the evidence is hiding in plain sight, indeed nerfed, a victim of the very landscape the proof of it must live within.
Whenever I tell people about any of these things, there is always something someone had heard about before, but also many people hadn’t known was occurring, or didn't realize the scope of the problem, or perhaps even the true nature of it. Sometimes people assumed what they heard was just a joke.
Worse, there are people who are repeatedly resistant to believing it. People argue that surely it’s not deliberate, that it’s just regular weird people being foolish, or that it’s just a few bad actors, or that it’s all a big coincidence. Some demand proof, and once given evidence, demand more proof, and people sometimes still demand to know - but why? Claim wrongly this is just speculation. Even with tons of scientific publications, academic lectures, military documentation, and trade news detailing it all.
The problem is that people don’t want to believe this information attack is happening, or especially that we may have been fooled by something. Because we all have been fooled by disinformation, marketing, and PR, at some point, and none of us want to think about that too much. And that’s a big part of why it works so well.
Quote by Rand Waltzman on a podcast - “In a cognitive attack the whole point is that the target shouldn’t know they’re being attacked in order for it to be really effective. So that's the whole trick to keep the target unaware because if the target becomes aware that they’re being attacked in this way, just by them becoming aware it significantly reduces the effect of the attack.”
Disinformation (or malinformation) is pushed out by business interests, multinational corporate interests, ideological interests, political interests, and geopolitical interests, with advertising and PR placements, and they take advantage of the social media platforms which are designed to keep people wanting to engage on the platform, and as a result the influence campaigns can manipulate platforms to promote ordinary people also spreading and sharing this stuff, in a feedback loop. Influencers and content creators and various clout chasers pick up on what gets the attention, and what content is going to generate money in the form of views, likes, follows, and paid subscriptions. A business ecosystem of sock puppet troll farms and botnets help boost the content - wherever it is, no matter who posts it.
When the neighbor repeats a made-up controversial story, or some rando on the internet uses some woke-washing argument - that’s often misinformation, and people are getting hoodwinked unwittingly into believing stuff and spreading it. But it came from somewhere else. And if it was deliberate, and it often was, that is disinformation, the original source of which is deliberately obscured. In some cases people may have even paid for the propaganda which is often embedded in enticing and even useful material available by content creators via subscriptions, donations, and purchasing related goods, feeding a complex economic system of direct and indirect profiting, and a lot of people are chasing this business. It’s hard to determine who’s directly being paid to spread lies or mess around deliberately since even influencers and celebrities don’t always disclose, even when they’re supposed to by law. Small time operators may not even be paid directly, or even know who exactly is paying them, or even know exactly why. But whether people are looking to make money in this media space, or merely find they enjoy attention, it’s not too hard to figure out what buzzwords or topics are going to garner the most likes and views, often assisted by someone else’s operation’s troll farms and botnets. And sadly, the biggest money seems to be behind boosting the absolute worst products, ideas, and politics, and boosting controversy about bad things, thereby getting those bad things more attention than they would have otherwise. And often this drive includes undermining things that are prosocial and scientifically sound, because public health and science often run counter to the interests of those running these operations.
Sharing of misinformation is habitual, not just lazy or biased, Gizem Ceylan, Ian A. Anderson, and Wendy Wood, Edited by Susan Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; received September 28, 2022; accepted December 3, 2022, January 17, 2023 120 (4) e2216614120 Why do people share misinformation on social media? In this research (N = 2,476), we show that the structure of online sharing built into social platforms is more important than individual deficits in critical reasoning and partisan bias—commonly cited drivers of misinformation. Due to the reward-based learning systems on social media, users form habits of sharing information that attracts others' attention. Once habits form, information sharing is automatically activated by cues on the platform without users considering response outcomes such as spreading misinformation. As a result of user habits, 30 to 40% of the false news shared in our research was due to the 15% most habitual news sharers. Suggesting that sharing of false news is part of a broader response pattern established by social media platforms, habitual users also shared information that challenged their own political beliefs. Finally, we show that sharing of false news is not an inevitable consequence of user habits: Social media sites could be restructured to build habits to share accurate information.
Feedback Loops
Australian Army Occasional Paper No. 8 The Effectiveness of Influence Activities in Information Warfare by CASSANDRA BROOKER This propaganda feedback loop demonstrates the power of inundation, repetition, emotional/social contagions, and personality bias confirmations, as well as demonstrating behaviours of people preferring to access entertaining content that does not require ‘System 2’ critical thought. Audiences encountered multiple versions of the same story, propagated over months, through their favoured media sources, to the point where both recall and credibility were enhanced, fact-checkers were overwhelmed and a ‘majority illusion’ was created.
Troll Farms & Paid Sock Puppets
Axios - The global business of professional trolling. By Sara Fischer, Apr 13, 2021 Professional political trolling is still a thriving underground industry around the world, despite crackdowns from the biggest tech firms. Why it matters: Coordinated online disinformation efforts offer governments and political actors a fast, cheap way to get under rivals' skin. They also offer a paycheck to people who are eager for work, typically in developing countries. "It's a more sophisticated means of disinformation to weaken your advisories," said Todd Carroll, CISO and VP of Cyber Operations at CybelAngel.
BBC Trending (podcast) - Brazil’s real life trolls - Sun 23 Apr 2023 "Trolls are necessary and I'm going to explain why. We have a troll farm. A lot of them. What we don't use are bots. Bots are different things. you can buy it in India and they give you 10,000 likes in a second. That doesn't work because it's not legitimate. What we do, for example with trolls, is to generate some kind of relevance within the social network's algorithms. They have become very rigid about what they show and what they don't. And that has to do with the relevance of the publication. So what trolls do is give relevance to a certain publication. Good publicity, so that it can be shown more than other publications."
NISOS - Research: Election Manipulation as a Business Model, May 24, 2023 Predictvia is a predictive analytics firm headquartered in Venezuela and Florida. Chief executive officer Ernesto Olivo Valverde and Maria Acedo founded the company in 2013. Predictvia was built on their Seentra platform, which derived from the Tucomoyo “predictive analysis platform” that Olivo Valverde’s prior company Ing3nia developed. (see source 1 in appendix) In 2013, tucomoyo[.]com began redirecting to Ing3nia’s website. Discourse and Election Manipulation Claims Predictvia claims to use artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate public discourse using fake social media accounts. (see source 2 in appendix) Predictvia claims its platform conducts the following activities: (see source 3 in appendix) - The Seenatra analytics platform identifies “human interests” and other data gathered from social media or directly from users via the DAS intelligent sampling system, recording topic data and generating tags. - Run survey processes to verify which tags have the most activity of interest. - Deployment of campaigns to those social media environments to influence and manipulate public discourse.
TNW - Astroturfing Reddit is the future of political campaigning - July 11, 2017 - 1:23 pm Matthew Hughes Right here is where things get a little sketchy, as Hack PR decided to look into gaming Reddit to bring some momentum to their campaign. “I knew that if I could get one of my links to the top of Reddit Politics, I would have a pretty good chance of making the idea spread, so I set that as my goal: Get to the top of Reddit Politics within 24 hours.” What it did next was simple. A Hack PR staffer published a link to a Washington Times article about the campaign, who then purchased every single upvote package on Fiverr.com, for a total cost of $35. The post soon blew up and became the most popular article on r/politics. Hack PR also anonymously spammed over 20,000 media contacts with a link to the Reddit post. Each time a publication covered the news, it would repeat the same process with the Washington Times article.
Botnets
MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy April 19 - Filippo Menczer, Indiana University published Dec 21, 2022 And then you see a bunch of accounts that are you know not quite as influential but they play a key role in amplifying the message and these are the red nodes that you see a little bit towards the periphery and the reason they're colored red is because they're likely automated. These are accounts that we you know, we have, I'll tell you more later about our machine learning tools to recognize social bots, and those are likely bots that just automatically retweet everything that comes from certain accounts.
DarkReading.com - The Rise Of Social Media Botnets. In the social Internet, building a legion of interconnected bots -- all accessible from a single computer -- is quicker and easier than ever before. By James C. Foster, Founder & CEO, ZeroFOX, July 07, 2015 Cyber criminals use social media botnets to disseminate malicious links, collect intelligence on high profile targets, and spread influence. As opposed to traditional botnets, each social bot represents an automated social account rather than an infected computer. This means building a legion of interconnected bots is much quicker and easier than ever before, all accessible from a single computer. The person commanding the botnet, also known as a bot herder, generally has two options for building their botnet. The first is fairly ad hoc, simply registering as many accounts as possible to a program that allows the herder to post via the accounts as if they were logged in. The second approach is to create the botnet via a registered network application: the attacker makes a phony app, links a legion of accounts, and changes the setting to allow the app to post on behalf of the associated accounts. Via the app, the herder then has programmatic access to the full army of profiles. This is essentially how ISIS built their Dawn of Glad Tidings application, which acts as a centralized hub that posts en masse on behalf of all its users.
U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION - Press Release SEC Charges Kim Kardashian for Unlawfully Touting Crypto Security FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 2022-183 Washington D.C., Oct. 3, 2022 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced charges against Kim Kardashian for touting on social media a crypto asset security offered and sold by EthereumMax without disclosing the payment she received for the promotion. Kardashian agreed to settle the charges, pay $1.26 million in penalties, disgorgement, and interest, and cooperate with the Commission’s ongoing investigation. The SEC’s order finds that Kardashian failed to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to publish a post on her Instagram account about EMAX tokens, the crypto asset security being offered by EthereumMax. Kardashian’s post contained a link to the EthereumMax website, which provided instructions for potential investors to purchase EMAX tokens. "This case is a reminder that, when celebrities or influencers endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, it doesn’t mean that those investment products are right for all investors," said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. "We encourage investors to consider an investment’s potential risks and opportunities in light of their own financial goals."
Skepchick - Big Oil Bought my Favorite Science Influencer, by Rebecca Watson, January 26, 2023 If you search for information about the overwhelming damage caused by oil and natural gas refining you will find that quite easily, but if you search for information on the damage caused by propane, you’ll find pretty much nothing but press releases from the propane industry bragging about how burning it isn’t as bad as burning diesel. And that, I’m sad to say, is what Calandrelli’s video is: propaganda wholly funded by the Propane Education and Research Council, or PERC, a fossil fuel industry group that the New York Times recently exposed as an ethically (and maybe legally) shady operation that is currently spending millions of dollars to hire “influencers” on TikTok, YouTube, and cable TV to sow misinformation about zero-emission energy, despite the fact that the law that allowed them to collect that money apparently stipulates that it be used for “research and safety.” The quotes the New York Times got from propane industry leaders are absolutely disgusting, like one executive saying that they need to “combat the growing narrative that fossil fuel combustion is the main cause of climate change, and that propane is a dirty fossil fuel,” which, you know, it is and it is? They see zero-emission electric as a “threat to (their) industry,” which it is, which is good.
The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War by Mark Galeotti - Feb 2023 Outsourcing goes beyond direct warfare and into non-kinetic contests. This century has also seen the explosion of the gig economy. Individual freelancers and temporary workers sometimes recruited directly, sometimes through online platforms or third party matchmakers. It may seem ridiculous to draw comparisons with the cycle courier that brings you your pizza. But this is less fanciful than might appear in an age when conflicts may be fought through the medium of carefully curated newspaper articles highlighting a grievance or attacking a government. And when online influencers can pivot from hyping a hair product to pushing a political cause.
Audience Capture, Indirect Incentives, and Feedback Loops
MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy - Thinker-Fest: Session 1 - Fireside Chat - How to Fix the “Splinternet” Mar 3, 2023 There are also indirect economic benefits. These are people that create content farms so for example there are businesses who are just invested in getting people to click regardless of what side. We see this a lot in the political sphere where you'll have the same company creating extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing content with a goal to monetize the clicks and the revenues. And then you also see hidden benefits and this is where it gets a little tricky these are companies that benefit from the discourse in ways that are slightly removed. So for example the latest conspiracy theory of 2023 which is the “15-minute City” conspiracy which we can talk about that is, that gives a lot of benefit to oil. And that is being perpetuated by Big Oil influencers which I'm sad to say actually exist. And so that is something to look at, that all of these end consumers are being accessed, or being manipulated, by very specific economic agendas.
Alastair McAlpine, MD Jan 25 2023 • 14 tweets We’ve all wondered why scientists or MDs “turn”. How respected folk can find themselves deep in the anti-vax community. It’s a decidedly simple (but dangerous and malicious) process. Below is a thread on how people become “red pilled.” Imagine you’re a YouTuber and you think you explain science well. Imagine you’ve built a loyal following on mostly reliable stuff and get 50k-ish views per video. Now imagine you dip your toe into contrarian waters: there’s this new drug: ivermectin. /1 You read a meta-analysis which is favourable and you have on your show an enthusiastic guest with all the right qualifications. This seems legit! Could this work? Is science missing out on something big? Have you stumbled onto the cure for COVID-19? /2 Suddenly… 700k views! With those extra views comes a SIGNIFICANT bump in revenue. You’re now earning fairly substantial amounts. You go back to the fuddy, “mainstream” stuff, and interest in your videos tanks. You’re back to 50k again (and minimal cash). /3 So you once again do something controversial. You start “wondering” about the vaccine. Views skyrocket. People in the comments are telling you what an extraordinary truth-seeker you are. What a great mind.
Tech Won’t Save Us podcast - 23 06 08 [#171] The Influencer Industry Is Built on Precarity Emily Hund Technology has changed — a lot has changed. But the sort of basic principles of economic uncertainty, a sense of professional precarity, a sense of uncertainty about the future, and the sort of pressure to rely on yourself, and figure out how to survive on your own. And also this sense of social distrust sense of sort of powerlessness or resignation to the monopolist billionaires that are seemingly taking over more and more like functions of our lives, the sort of fundamental, negatively tinged feelings of uncertainty really haven’t changed. And so, that I think keeps the appeal of becoming a successful content creator influencer. And it continues to sort of lock people into this sort of loop of: I have to find ways to create a safety net for myself, so maybe I should start posting on TikTok, even though I’m a vet, or even though I am a school teacher; I should start making content on TikTok because you never know. And so that sort of fundamental uncertainty and the economic reality that many people, even super educated professionals are living paycheck to paycheck in many cases. And so that kind of keeps gas in the tank of this industry.
MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy - Thinker-Fest: Session 1 - Fireside Chat - How to Fix the “Splinternet” Mar 3, 2023 They are really invested in gaining social capital and reputation for participating in these types of industries. And they also have economic models at play. You can buy flat earth sweatshirts, you can buy anti-vax stickers and notebooks, you can pay subscription fees, you can watch videos that are monetized on YouTube. And this is also very much a reputational economy. We also have a factor that I don't think is talked about a lot which are intentional antagonists otherwise known as trolls. What's interesting about them from a digital community perspective is that they too are chasing social currency but the reputation that they're cultivating within their own communities is one where the more chaos they create, the more reputation credibility that they have. And so these three forces are kind of at play when we look at what's happening from an individual and community's perspective. The issue is that if you broaden out, you start to see that all of these dynamics can take place because there are very clear revenue models and businesses. People are making money from this. For example I trace what's called direct benefits. So these are companies that are selling products and services directly related to the idea that's circulating. So if you are anti-vax, you are selling supplements right, if you are, you're selling essential oils, you're selling products that are directly benefiting from the disinformation or misinformation that is circulating.
MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy - Thinker-Fest: Session 1 - Fireside Chat - How to Fix the “Splinternet” Mar 3, 2023 Because these economic models themselves are also existing within the algorithmic ecosystem that we all live in. These are the platforms that we use whether it's Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook. And what you'll see is you'll have platforms whose business models depend on, for example, engagement metrics. So a company like Facebook could say we don't care so much about the content we just want the thing that is going to capture your attention the most and we want the thing that is going to keep you on the platform the longest, which then drives consumer behavior. Because then you have the companies that are profiting from it, you have companies that have the AI feed so what is being recommended to you, what do you see, what is being suggested. There have been numerous studies done that show that if you are on social networks some of the content that the algorithm suggests becomes increasingly radicalized over time, you see more and more extreme viewpoints. And finally you have ad based revenue so there's an incentive for companies to be able to target people at a very specific level.
The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War by Mark Galeotti - Feb 2023 This may be the age of multinational corporations, mass social movements, and powerful governments, but a coincidence of technological, social, and political change means that it is also the age of the individual, and many of them are for hire. Suddenly the world is full of people who seem to be doing the work of states. Yet not as direct employees, nor even out of ideological commitment or patriotic passion. Journalists hired to write hit pieces. Scholars saying the right things for a grant. Think tanks producing recommendations to order. There may be no geopolitical equivalent of Uber yet, but lobbying, strategic communications - were I a cynic I would suggest this is what we call propaganda when we do it ourselves - and similar consultancy and service companies often act as the middlemen.
The Daily Show - Pizzagate: Are Democrats Harvesting Children’s Blood? - Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy Jul 10, 2023 Elise Wang: that's what really struck me about pizzagate it was the first time that i really saw this where you could see there was already this this theory about a pedophile ring being run by the clintons and it was kind of a theory in need of specifics and so they went out seeking specifics and they decided basically randomly that comet ping pong was going to be the place and then it started this sort of multimedia propaganda campaign where people they got people to call and harass as matt was saying um they got people to flood the the yelp reviews and the google reviews and people to go and harass the proprietor and then this sort of culminated in the guy who drove up from north carolina to self-investigate but that wasn't really the the story the story was that then people talked about it that then it was in the national media for like 48 hours like a whole week and it was not only in the media their theory was in the media and i went back to the message boards afterwards and they were just beside themselves with joy over this like it was not a it's not at all about oh our guy was arrested whoops or huh he didn't really seem to find anything um it was not about that it was about the media exposure and then there were sort of further suggestions well how can we get them to keep denying it so they keep saying it so people keep googling it and when i was seeing that i was like oh this is something else this is this is a kind of savvy media campaign that i think most of us at that point were not totally familiar with now we know if you mention something you have to be very careful what what sort of buzzwords you mentioned because it will sort of feed the conspiracy theory monster
The Cognitive Crucible podcast - #154 Todd Leventhal on Countering Disinformation - Jun 27 2023 “You can have conspiracy theories that circulate on their own, or in certain subgroups of the population. And quite often what the Russians will do is they’ll watch, they’ll watch what people are saying in our country, and they’ll pick up anything that might be useful for them, and they’ll circulate it.”
ILoveAncestry.com - COINTELPRO against the Black Movement of the 1970sGovernment covert action against the Black Movement also continued in the 1970s. Targets ranged from community-based groups to the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika and the surviving remnants of the Black Panther Party. In Mississippi, federal and state agents attempted to discredit and disrupt the United League of Marshall County, a broad-based grassroots civil rights group struggling to stop the Klan violence. In California, a notorious paid operative for the FBI, Darthard Perry, code-named “Othello,” infiltrated and disrupted local Black groups and took personal credit for the fire that razed the Watts Writers Workshop’s multi-million dollar cultural center in Los Angeles in 1973. The Los Angeles Police Department later admitted infiltrating at least seven 1970s community groups, including the Black-led Coalition Against Police Abuse.
Mashable - 12 people are behind most of the anti-vaxxer disinformation you see on social media. The "Disinformation Dozen" are spreading anti-vaccination content throughout the internet. By Matt Binder on March 24, 2021 A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Vax Watch found that up to 65 percent of “anti-vaccine content” on Facebook and Twitter originated from twelve influencers within the anti-vaxxer movement. The report focused on these twelve accounts after an analysis of content that was shared and posted on Facebook and Twitter 812,000 times between Feb. 1 and March 16. On Facebook alone, the content from these individuals, which the reports dubs as the “Disinformation Dozen,” accounts for 73 percent of all anti-vaxxer content posted or shared on the platform in the last two months. The largest anti-vaxxer influencer on social media, according to the report, is Joseph Mercola. Mercola is an alternative medicine promoter who runs a multimillion dollar online business selling treatments and dietary supplements. The FDA recently sent Mercola a warning over his sham treatments for COVID-19. Another major culprit is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy, the nephew of John F. Kennedy, is perhaps one of the most high profile influencers in the anti-vaxxer community.
Off the Grid News - How to Identify an Agent Provocateur Written by: Bill Heid As the paranoia common to governments grows, the question arises: will your group or church or political action committee be targeted with agent provocateurs at some point? Why not? The targets have been quite various, with government certainly not always focused on so-called radicals. At the same time, governments’ definitions of what groups are risky can change quickly and silently. It certainly wouldn’t be advertized. Many groups haven’t discovered their agent provocateurs until years after their activity. Would you be able to spot an agent provocateur? They try to blend in and make friends. They appear to share your interests.
Agents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist - In Snow, D. Della Porta, D., Klandermans, B. and McAdam, D. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Blackwell, 2012. Gary T. Marx In democratic settings with basic civil liberties, the need to sustain the veneer of legality and legitimacy among citizens can be conducive to reliance on hidden trickery and strategic disruption of an organization's ability to function. This can involve manipulating activists (particularly leaders) into illegal actions so they can be arrested requiring that resources go to defensive needs and away from the pursuit of the broader goals; disrupting the flow of resources such as money and spaces to organize; creating paranoia and suspiciousness and harming morale and solidarity by creating the myth of surveillance which implies that watching is omnipresent (With respect to the student movement, a 1970 FBI memo for example encouraged creating the impression that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.); spreading disinformation; encouraging internal schisms and external conflicts with other organizations; and inhibiting or sabotaging planned actions and communication.In establishing credibility and seeking to rise within an organization, agents can offer needed energy and resources.
Deadline Detroit - Erik Prince linked to spy infiltration of Michigan teachers' union. March 07, 2020 The New York Times, in a story posted today, names Prince as the recruiter of high-level spies trained to infiltrate American organizations on behalf of Project Veritas, a conservative group that uses hidden cameras and microphones in sting operations against people it considers enemies, including news media. One was in Michigan
The Nation - Blackwater’s Black Ops - Internal documents reveal the firm’s clandestine work for multinationals and governments. Jeremy Scahill This article appears in the October 4, 2010 issue. One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through Total Intelligence, sought to become the “intel arm” of Monsanto, offering to provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm. --- In November 2007 officials from Prince’s companies developed a pricing structure for security and intelligence services for private companies and wealthy individuals. One official wrote that Prado had the capacity to “develop infrastructures” and “conduct ground-truth and security activities.” According to the pricing chart, potential customers could hire Prado and other Blackwater officials to operate in the United States and globally: in Latin America, North Africa, francophone countries, the Middle East, Europe, China, Russia, Japan, and Central and Southeast Asia.
NPR - How A Former Spy Trained Conservatives To Infiltrate Progressive Groups. July 1, 2021 1:39 PM ET - Heard on Fresh Air By Dave Davies GOLDMAN: No. They were, in fact, undercover spies who had been building a cover as eager Democrats when, in fact, they were anything but that. And Las Vegas was the - you could almost say it was the pinnacle, the apex of their operation. DAVIES: They'd gotten formal training in this. GOLDMAN: What - the training they got was when they worked for an outfit called Project Veritas. And they received what was essentially clandestine training at a ranch in Wyoming that's owned by the family of Erik Prince. DAVIES: Right - Erik Prince, the security contractor who we'll talk more about. So flesh out the picture a bit. This couple, Beau and Sofia - they spent real time and effort trying to ingratiate themselves with Democrats and progressives. What kind of inroads did they make? GOLDMAN: Well, they - you know, they - Beau is from Cody, Wyo., so he had some Wyoming roots. Sofia is from Maryland. And they start trying to make inroads in the Wyoming Democratic Party. Beau picks up - starts working this marijuana legalization angle to try to make contacts with people - elected officials who are, in fact, pushing this bill to legalize marijuana. And then on a parallel but different track, you know, Sofia is trying to make her way through the Young Democrats of Wyoming, the Wyoming Democratic Party, you know, building her bona fides as an eager, young Democrat. DAVIES: Right. They make significant political contributions, right? GOLDMAN: Beau does. Sofia makes a contribution - a small contribution to a woman she had befriended who ran, unsuccessfully, for the Wyoming state legislature.
TIME - Exclusive: Documents Reveal Erik Prince's $10 Billion Plan to Make Weapons and Create a Private Army in Ukraine By Simon Shuster/Kyiv - July 7, 2021 3:12 PM EDT His full plan, dated June 2020 and obtained exclusively by TIME this spring, includes a “roadmap” for the creation of a “vertically integrated aviation defense consortium” that could bring $10 billion in revenues and investment. The audacity of the proposal fit with Prince’s record as a businessman. For nearly a quarter century, the former Navy SEAL has been a pioneer in the private military industry, raising armies in the Middle East and Africa, training commandos at his base in North Carolina and deploying security forces around the world for the State Department and the CIA. Under the Trump Administration, Prince’s family—a powerful clan of right-wing Republican donors from Michigan—saw their influence rise. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education, while Prince himself leveraged contacts in the White House to chase major deals around the world. The ones he pursued in Ukraine were among the most ambitious of his long career. But with Trump out of office, the Ukrainian government has slowed the process and invited more competition for the assets Prince coveted. “Had it been another four years of Trump, Erik would probably be closing the deal,” says Novikov, one of its lead Ukrainian negotiators.
Boulder Weekly - Trumpist spy and smear op hiding in Wyoming. By Dave Anderson - January 5, 2023 In 2014, Mother Jones reported that Project Veritas attempted to discredit Colorado’s new universal mail-in ballot system. O’Keefe and his collaborators disguised themselves and approached numerous Democratic campaigns and political organizations in Colorado to mishandle or fraudulently cast mail-in ballots. A man who said he was an LGBT activist came to a Democratic Party office in Boulder, asking if he could fill out ballots for other college students who had moved out of the state. He was told not to because it would be voter fraud. A few days later, the man returned to the office with another man who he introduced as a 45-year-old CU Boulder “civics professor.” He had a phony mustache and heavy makeup. Staffers identified O’Keefe as the “professor.” O’Keefe would later tweet a photo of himself in this disguise.
SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL Strategic Services Field Manual No. 3 Office of Strategic Services Washington, D.C. 17 January 1944UNCLASSIFIED SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL Strategic Services (Provisional) STRATEGIC SERVICES FIELD MANUAL No. 3 (11) General Interference with Organizations and Production (a) Organizations and Conferences (1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. (2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments. (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five. (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. (7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
Connection Mirages, Culty Gurus, and Contaminated Communities
University of Virginia - Information Security at UVA - Learn to recognize and prevent Facebook Group scams. Facebook group hacks are devastating because they prey on the human tendency to trust others within a group -- especially when that group is specifically formed on a common interest. Hackers manipulate that same sense of community that makes online groups so enjoyable for many users to get access to private and/or sensitive information. Furthermore, there are often so many posts and users in a Facebook group that a new user with little profile information doesn’t always stand out as suspicious. Finally, users browsing in Facebook groups are often there for the sense of comfort that comes with enjoying an interest with other community members, so they operate with their guard down, making them more vulnerable to social engineering attacks.
What Is a Watering Hole Attack? - Proofpoint.comA watering hole attack is a targeted attack designed to compromise users within a specific industry or group of users by infecting websites they typically visit and luring them to a malicious site. The end goal is to infect the user’s computer with malware and gain access to the organization’s network. Watering hole attacks, also known as strategic website compromise attacks, are limited in scope as they rely on an element of luck. They do however become more effective, when combined with email prompts to lure users to websites.
The Atlantic - Local Politics Was Already Messy. Then Came Nextdoor. Community moderators say the social network is being exploited for political gain. By Eli Sanders, May 24, 2023 “At this point, Nextdoor is actively tampering in local elections,” one of the moderators wrote in an email to Nextdoor just over a week before Election Day. “It’s awful and extraordinarily undemocratic.” To this day, what really happened on Nextdoor during the Akyuz-Anderl race is something of a mystery, although emails from Nextdoor, along with other evidence, point toward a kind of digital astroturfing. Akyuz, who lost by a little over 1,000 votes, believes that Nextdoor’s volunteer moderators “interfered” with the election. Three local moderators who spoke with me also suspect this. Misinformation and biased moderation on Nextdoor “without a doubt” affected the outcome of the city-council election, says Washington State Representative Tana Senn, a Democrat who supported Akyuz.
The Cognitive Crucible - #134 DANIEL “PLATO” MORABITO ON A COMPREHENSIVE THEORY OF INFORMATION WARFARE, Feb 7, 2023 “This idea that social media is curating content specifically for you based on your interest. You have outsourced your filtering of information to an algorithm that's now feeding you really just specifically information that reinforces your own biases. And that's very dangerous. Because you're getting a very tailored curated perception of reality that's skewed to what you already think is true.” — Daniel Morabito
Wired - 06.17.2020 08:00 AM Facebook Groups Are Destroying America. They’re built for privacy and community—and that’s what makes them dangerous. Many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends,” explained Mark Zuckerberg in a 2019 blog post. “People are more cautious of having a permanent record of what they've shared.” But as our research shows, those same features—privacy and community—are often exploited by bad actors, foreign and domestic, to spread false information and conspiracies. Dynamics in groups often mirror those of peer-to-peer messaging apps: People share, spread, and receive information directly to and from their closest contacts, whom they typically see as reliable sources. To make things easier for those looking to stoke political division, groups provide a menu of potential targets organized by issue and even location; bad actors can create fake profiles or personas tailored to the interests of the audiences they intend to infiltrate. This allows them to seed their own content in a group and also to repurpose its content for use on other platforms.
Wired - This Is Catfishing on an Industrial Scale. Hired as customer service reps, these freelancers were instead tasked with luring in the lonely and lovestruck through a network of dating and hookup sites. By LAURA COLE, MAY 16, 2023 It wasn’t long before he found out. Rather than moderating content, Liam was asked to adopt fake online personas—known as “virtuals”—in order to chat to customers, most of them men looking for relationships or casual sex. Using detailed profiles of customers and well-crafted virtuals, Liam was expected to lure people into paying, message by message, for conversations with fictional characters. This is how, while pretending to be Anna2001, he found himself staring at an old acquaintance. But, he thought, hands slack on the keyboard, he needed the money. So for the next two minutes, he played the role he was paid to. Liam is one of hundreds of freelancers employed all over the world to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites. WIRED spoke to dozens of people working in the industry, people who had worked for months at a time at two of the companies involved in the creation of virtual profiles. vDesk didn’t respond to requests for comment. Often recruited into “customer support” or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online.
The Surprising Nuance Behind the Russian Troll Strategy. We set out to study internet discourse around #BlackLivesMatter — instead, we were unintentionally learning about the Russian information operation to undermine democracy. By Kate Starbird on Medium, Oct 20, 2018 These IRA [Internet Research Agency] agents were enacting caricatures of politically active U.S. citizens. In some cases, these were gross caricatures of the worst kinds of online actors, using the most toxic rhetoric. But, in other cases, these accounts appeared to be everyday people like us, people who care about the things we care about, people who want the things we want, people who share our values and frames. These suggest two different aspects of these information operations. First, these information operations are targeting us within our online communities, the places we go to have our voices heard, to make social connections, to organize political action. They are infiltrating these communities by acting like other members of the community, developing trust, gathering audiences. Second, these operations begin to take advantage of that trust for different goals, to shape those communities toward the strategic goals of the operators (in this case, the Russian government). One of these goals is to “sow division,” to put pressure on the fault lines in our society. A divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find common ground, is one that is easily manipulated.
TIME: How Addictive Social Media Algorithms Could Finally Face a Reckoning in 2022 By Megan McCluskey JANUARY 4, 2022 Often compared to Big Tobacco for the ways in which their products are addictive and profitable but ultimately unhealthy for users, social media’s biggest players are facing growing calls for both accountability and regulatory action. In order to make money, these platforms’ algorithms effectively function to keep users engaged and scrolling through content, and by extension advertisements, for as long as possible.
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Mere Exposure Effect, by Katja Falkenbach, Gleb Schaab, Oliver Pfau, Magdalena Ryfa, Bahadir Birkan The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things or people that are more familiar to them than others. Repeated exposure increases familiarity. This effect is therefore also known as the familiarity effect. The earliest known research on the effect was conducted by Gustav Fechner in 1876. The effect was also documented by Edward Titchener and described as the glow of warmth one feels in the presence of something familiar.
A Conversation with the Authors of "Sustaining Shopping Momentum in Retail Malls using Real-Time Messaging" - Journal of Retailing on Linkedin - May 1, 2023Our first expectation of looking at heavy vs. light buyers was that maybe the light buyers would get more out of the incentives. I think our result turned out to be the opposite because receiving incentives by real-time messaging might cause a bit of an overload and makes buyers start to think, “wait, what did I just receive?”. Light buyers need to think about it more and the minute they need to think about it more, they start deliberating on it and thus, they kind of take a step back. The strategy to target the light buyers would be communicating in a very clear way. It has to be very simplified and easy for them to understand so that you don’t disrupt the momentum and their mindset.
Harvard Business Review - Ads That Don’t Overstep. How to make sure you don’t take personalization too far by Leslie K. John, Tami Kim, and Kate Barasz From the Magazine (January–February 2018) Data gathered on the web has vastly enhanced the capabilities of marketers. With people regularly sharing personal details online and internet cookies tracking every click, companies can now gain unprecedented insight into individual consumers and target them with tailored ads. But when this practice feels invasive to people, it can prompt a strong backlash. Marketers today need to understand where to the draw the line. The good news is that psychologists already know a lot about what triggers privacy concerns off-line. These norms—and the authors’ research—strongly suggest that firms steer clear of two ad-targeting techniques generally disliked by consumers: using information obtained on a third-party site rather than on the site on which an ad appears, which is akin to talking behind someone’s back; and deducing information about people (such as a pregnancy) from analytics when they haven’t declared it themselves. If marketers avoid those tactics, use data judiciously, focus on increasing trust and transparency, and offer people control over their personal data, their ads are much more likely to be accepted by consumers and help raise interest in engaging with a company and its products.
And Voila, An Anti-Mask Twitter Rando by Chloe Humbert on Medium, Apr 7 2023I came across a particularly aggressive anti-mask account on twitter in early 2021. He made a ridiculous capitalist fever dream argument to justify duping people into unmasking and getting sick, and maybe dying, for business interests. It seemed so blatantly ridiculous. Tweet from @reubenR80027912 dated 1019 am May 7, 2021 says Main Street is Very simple. Do 3 things PSA campaigns that you won’t die if vaxxed. Remind people kids aren’t a risk. Remove masks everywhere so people don’t constantly live in fear. Voila. Roaring economy. Spending is about freedom from fear. Quote-tweet from same account on February 22, 2021 says There’s something to the Mad Men pilot and covid. Telling people they’re more likely to die in a car accident than covid doesn’t matter. Nor do vax stats. Happiness is freedom from fear, a billboard that screams whatever you’re doing is ok @ DKThomp
Niccolo - High Pressure Sales Techniques and How to Deal with Them By Siobhan High-pressure Sales Techniques, and How to Avoid Them THE TIME LIMIT This typically involves the salesperson catching on that you’re hesitant about a deal, and then informing you there’s a time limit on the deal. This is used by sales people to create pressure, making the customer think that they’ll lose out on a deal if they do not act immediately. Often this means the customer doesn’t have time to consider alternative options, nor read the terms and conditions. This can lead to people signing contracts which contain incriminating small print which will leave you caught-out later. HOW TO HANDLE The most beneficial thing you can do in this situation is: Take a second. Breathe. Stepping away from a deal for a minute can provide you with the necessary headspace the salesperson is trying to rob from you. This minute will let you process the deal, think about whether you actually want it, and recognise if you’re in an intimidating situation.
Jonathan Laxton MD, FRCPC tweet July 6 2023 William Makis being used as an "unbiased" adjudicator. He has misattributed more deaths to the COVID vaccines than anyone else including: death after 1 year of cancer, climbing K2, motor vehicle collisions, complications of plastic surgery, drowning, etc… Conflicts of Interest: Many of the authors are affiliated with "The Wellness Company" (McCullough, Trozzi, Hodksinson, Makis, Amerling, Alexander, Risch). This makes this piece feel more like a marketing brochure than a study. They mention, but downplay the COI. The Wellness Company sells supplements targetted to "preventing myocarditis" and "blocking spike protein" including preventing illness from "vaccine shedding" and "treating vaccine injury"
PR Tactics
Toxic Sludge is Good for You 2002 In today’s corporate culture major PR firms promote crisis management as a necessary business expense. Whenever something bad happens to a corporation, often its first move is not to deal with the actual problem, but to manage the negative perception caused by that problem.
Toxic Sludge is Good for You 2002 Currently according to some estimates, more than 50% of what we think is news is actually instigated by the public relations industry. PR professionals measure their success in terms of how well they can insert their clients’ messages into the continuous flow of news and information while their own activities remain out of view.
Rand Waltzman’s Linkedin. Strategies for Manufacturing Doubt (5)Pose as a Defender of Health or Truth. (Mis)represent the goals of “B” as health-conscious or dedicated to truth. Obscure involvement to hide association. Ghostwrite, create shell companies, use attorney client privilege. Develop a PR strategy. Devise methods for specifically reaching public audiences to spread “B” messages.
Jane Mayer, Dark Money. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, January 2016 One environmental lawyer who clashed repeatedly with the Mercatus Center dismissed it as a lobbying shop dressed up as a non-profit, calling it a means of laundering economic aims. The lawyer explained the strategy: You take corporate money and give it to a neutral sounding think tank which hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible seeming studies but they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests with their funders.
Union of Concerned Scientists - Climate Solutions. We need to act now. For years, media pundits, partisan think tanks, and special interest groups funded by fossil fuel companies have raised doubts about the truth of global warming. These contrarians downplay and distort the evidence of climate change, lobby for policies that reward polluters, and attempt to undercut existing pollution standards. This barrage of disinformation misleads and confuses the public about the growing consequences of global warming and makes it more difficult to implement the solutions we really need. Until the influence of these special interests is sufficiently diminished, climate action will be that much harder.
Common Dreams - Fossil Fuel Interests Help Fuel Republican Attacks on 'Woke Capitalism' - A new report on the 2023 wave of anti-ESG legislation sourced it to a coordinated network of far-right and oil and gas special interest groups. By Olivia Rosane, Jun 22, 2023 ESG criteria is a way of taking different risk factors into account when making investment decisions, such as a company's workplace diversity, the treatment of employees, and preparedness for the climate crisis. Passing legislation to ban ESG-based decisions is a way to "manipulate the market to favor select industries, particularly the volatile fossil fuel and firearms sectors," Gibson and co-author Frances Sawyer, who is also the founder of Pleiades Strategy, wrote in the report. Gibson and Sawyer looked at where all these anti-ESG bills were coming from, mapping the "coordinated special interest groups that crafted model bills and lobbied for their introduction," they wrote. They concluded that the anti-ESG movement was an extension of a long-standing effort by right-wing groups to stymie corporate climate action.
Rand Waltzman’s Post on Linkedin Strategies for manufacturing doubt (6) Image has a cartoon where someone is staring at a door that is labeled journalism 101 and from inside the door comes the speech bubble that says fake news is announced, real news is leaked, and another cartoon labeled the reality of journalism, and it’s a drawing of a hand with an ink pen in it, and another hand is inserting a coin into the pen. The text reads Appeal to mass media. Appeal to journalistic balance. Develop relationships with media personnel. Prepare information for media personnel. Invoke the fairness doctrine. Take advantage of target’s lack of money / influence. Silence or abuse individuals by, out-spending, exploiting a power imbalance. Normalize negative outcomes. Normalize the presence of negative effects. Reduce importance. Make them seem inevitable.
Outrage factor From Wikipedia"Outrage factors" are the emotional factors that influence perception of risk. The risks that are considered involuntary, industrial and unfair are often given more weight than factors that are thought of as voluntary, natural and fair. Sandman gives the formula: Risk = Hazard + Outrage
The Pandata File. Detailed report on the international hub established April 2020 - COUNTER DISINFORMATION PROJECT, JUL 22, 2022I discovered Fagan was advising the group on messaging and communication strategy from a psychological approach I wondered if and how data could have been collected and used. (HART leaks messages) Tanya Klymenko 2021-02-02 T 13:08:48 "@ pf thank you for sharing, very interesting! So, if the "pro-mask" are particularly concerned about equality then they might in theory be susceptible to a message on raising inequality as a direct result of NPI (lockdown). Is that a reasonable assumption?" Patrick Fagan 2021-02-02 T 14:44:02 "Yes exactly... They are wearing the face mask to be fair to others and to reduce harm... If messaging shows that face masks are unfair and harmful, that would be very powerful"
Northwestern University - False balance in news coverage of climate change makes it harder to address the crisis. Northwestern research finds ‘bothsidesism’ in journalism undermines science - July 22, 2022 | By Max Witynski The argument that climate change is not man made has been incontrovertibly disproven by science again and again, yet many Americans believe that the global crisis is either not real, not of our making, or both, in part because the news media has given climate change deniers a platform in the name of balanced reporting, according to the researchers. In the study, the researchers found that false-balance reporting can make people doubt the scientific consensus on issues like climate change, sometimes making them wonder if an issue is even worth taking seriously. Debates about the efficacy of mask-wearing to prevent COVID-19 from spreading are another relevant example, Rapp said. Physicians broadly agree that it’s beneficial, but elevating the voices of a few people who disagree can cause unnecessary confusion.
The Decision Lab: Why we tend to rely heavily upon the first piece of information we receive. Anchoring Bias, explained. Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that causes us to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we are given about a topic. When we are setting plans or making estimates about something, we interpret newer information from the reference point of our anchor, instead of seeing it objectively. This can skew our judgment, and prevent us from updating our plans or predictions as much as we should.
Vox: How technology is designed to bring out the worst in us Feb 19, 2018 By Ezra Klein The main thing is to say it’s not by accident. It’s happening by design. Think of it like the Truth campaign with cigarettes. If you remember the 1990s TV ads, it was not saying, “Hey, this is going to have this bad health consequences for you if you smoke.” That feels like someone is telling you what to do. The Truth campaign was about telling you the truth about how they design it deliberately to be addictive. The simplest example I always use is Snapchat, which is the No. 1 way that all teenagers in the US communicate. It shows the number of days in a row that you sent a message to your friend. That’s a persuasive and manipulative technique called “the streak.”
Axios: Sean Parker unloads on Facebook: “God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains” by Mike Allen Nov 9, 2017 "The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'" "And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments." "It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.""The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."
PBS Hacking Your Mind - Living on Autopilot - Episode 101 Aired: 09/09/20According to Kahneman, when our slow-thinking system doesn't have enough information to answer a question involving numbers, we simply stay on autopilot. And our autopilot system takes what might be called a shortcut and anchors its answer to the last number that crossed its radar, even when that number is completely irrelevant to the question at hand. -And that leads us to reach an absurd conclusion. I know it seems bizarre that anyone would do that, and surely you and I, reasonable people, would never do that in our real lives. Well, you do it all the time.
Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University: Echo Chamber Why Is It So Convincing To Repeat A Claim Again And Again — Even If It’s Patently Untrue? The marketing term “effective frequency” refers to the idea that a consumer has to see or hear an ad a number of times before its message hits home. Essentially, the more you say something, the more it sticks in — and possibly on — people’s heads. It doesn’t even have to be true — and that’s the problem. What advertisers call “effective frequency,” psychologists call the “illusory truth effect”: the more you hear something, the easier it is for your brain to process, which makes it feel true, regardless of its basis in fact. “Each time, it takes fewer resources to understand,” says Lisa Fazio, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University. “That ease of processing gives it the weight of a gut feeling.” That feeling of truth allows misconceptions to sneak into our knowledge base, where they masquerade as facts, Fazio and her colleagues write in a 2015 journal article.
The New York Times: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley By Nellie Bowles Oct. 26, 2018 The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them. A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K. “Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer.
Psychology Today - Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It's exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 | Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.
AIR & SPACE POWER JOURNAL FALL 2021 - National Security and the Third-Road Threat. Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Information Warfare. By Daniel Morabito Information has been a vital component of warfare since the earliest recorded battles. In the 1469 BC Battle of Megiddo, the Hyksos King of Kadesh, who led a revolt of Palestinian and Syrian tribes against the Egyptian pharaoh, Thutmose III, was missing critical information as to the disposition of the Egyptian army. Anticipating an Egyptian attack on the stronghold city of Megiddo, the Hyksos king assessed the large Egyptian army would likely approach using one of two larger roads to the east and west of the city, and he divided his forces to intercept them. Using information gained from his scouts and discerning that the rebel leaders expected him to approach by these two broad roads, Thutmose instead chose a third, narrow road that led to the south of the city.
QVB - Climate Influencers Have A Problem Jan 9, 2023 by Isaias Hernandez When we make blanket statements like, “online activism isn’t real activism”, that can contribute to the erasure of people’s work. However, I personally think there are power imbalances in how online activism is now being valued higher than offline activism. Grassroots organizers and organizations have highly relevant data and case studies, showcasing how injustices were fought and what was demanded. Social media is commonly limiting the visibility of those stories and solutions, especially with a bias toward short-form content and short attention spans.
First NATO scientific meeting on Cognitive Warfare (France) — 21 June 2021 The impairment of cognitive processes has two harmful consequences: i) Contextual maladaptation, resulting in errors, missed gestures or temporary inhibition; and ii) Lasting disorder, which affects the personality and transforms its victim by locking him or her into a form of behavioral strangeness or inability to understand the world. In the first case, it is a question of causing transitory consequences, circumscribed by a particular critical environment (cf. Figure 4-1 Figure 4-1 is a drawing that could be reversible, a rabbit or a duck depending on how you look at it. ). The second concerns the transformation of the decision-making principles of individuals who then become disruptors or responsible for erroneous actions, or even non-action (cf. Figure 4-2 Figure 4-2 is A soldier sitting on a stump thinking with hand on chin and rifle at side, and the caption says A Thinker: what about the inhibition of action due to indecision or cognitive overload.)
The New Yorker Magazine: The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks. By Adrian Chen, July 27, 2016 The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
Shown in color against the Taxonomy of Influence Strategies are nine of 23 plays that are typically employed to meet and mitigate competitive influence programs and operations. Despite their popularity, this subset is notably defensive and often helpful to rival actors. Shown in gray are nine other plays that are often ignored by responding players but more capable of creating and maintaining strategic advantage in narrative conflicts. When competitors ding your reputation or dis your brand it's a reasonable impulse to fight back, especially when the messages they're making are mistaken or deceptive. But be careful. The plays that often inspire response are usually better at scoring points than winning games. Here's why: DEFENSIVE PLAYS Whether it's conservative policies, inexperience at narrative knife fights, or a bias for taking the proverbial high road, responders typically run plays that frame, divert and press (shown in color). These are influence strategies that do more to defend and maintain a status quo than shift it. Accordingly, responders avoid plays that probe, freeze or provoke (shown in gray). These are better for beating rivals, not simply beating them back. A GIFT TO ENEMIES If this is you, beware. Rivals will welcome you to their arena. And why not? A competitor with weak plays draws attention to the game but does little to steal a victory.
boot Foundation: Everything You Need to Know About Normalcy BiasWe believed that the “normal” experience would overtake the abnormal one, and so we did not act, believing falsely that the return to normalcy would be swift. This was normalcy bias at work, and it is behind some of the most devastating tragedies in the human experience.
National Security Challenges: Insights from Social, Neurobiological, and Complexity Sciences. Author | Editor: Astorino-Courtois, A. (NSI, Inc), Cabayan, H. (Joint Staff), Casebeer, W. (DARPA), Desjardins, A. (NSI, Inc), DiEuliis, D. (HHS), Ehlschlaeger, C. (ERDC), Lyle, D. (USAF) & Rice, C. (USA/TRADOC). According to Bandura (1996) moral disengagement is an internal thought process by which an individual is able to disengage their own inner moral control to justify inhumane conduct. For the most part, an individual’s moral standards, which are a product of their social and cultural learning, serve to regulate human behavior. This occurs by the self-sanctions that people apply to themselves when they violate their own internal standards. Self condemnation is a highly uncomfortable psychological state leading to devaluation of self worth and considerable anxiety (Bandura 1990). Consequently, most people seek to avoid a state in which their own actions are not in line with their internal moral standards. One such process, moral disengagement, involves the use of a variety of psycho-social mechanisms that allow an individual or group to disengage from their self regulatory standards and exonerate their violent behavior. The definitions of the eight mechanisms are included in Table 3 below.
Table 3. Mechanisms of moral disengagement. Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement Definition Moral Justification Portraying violent acts as serving a higher social cause Euphemistic Language Using sanitizing terms (e.g. martyrdom operations) so violent acts are seen as mild or benign Exonerative Comparison Comparing own acts of violence to extremely heinous or outrageous acts of violence Displacement of Responsibility Placing the responsibility for the harm one causes on other groups Diffusion of Responsibility Obscuring or minimizing the causal role played in the outcome of violent acts Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement Definition Ascription of Blame Blaming the victim of one’s action for causing the harm inflicted upon them Misrepresenting the Harm Minimizing, distorting or ignoring the harmful impact of one’s action Dehumanization Removing the human qualities of people/groups and replacing them with evil or demonic qualities
First NATO scientific meeting on Cognitive Warfare (France) — 21 June 2021 “Cognitive warfare” is one of the ways used by specialists to modify, orient and alter human reasoning for the purpose of conquest, superiority or inferiority of individuals, a group of individuals, groups, or populations. It is based on the knowledge of the cognitive processes mobilized by these individuals in the use and the control of their environment, notably technological, by means of digital technologies. Generally speaking, the aim is to modify the awareness that individuals have of reality in order to make them take erroneous decisions or prevent them from taking necessary decisions. “Cognitive warfare” is therefore a practice of using cognition for the purpose of military superiority.
Parallels: Authoritarian Cult Techniques & Social Media Features. LOVE BOMBING. Cults shower new members with affirmation, affection, and flattery for joining, creating a sense of instant community with shared values. Social media platforms shower users with positive notifications after joining, while personalized feeds create the perception of a community "just like you" EXPLOITING CONFIRMATION BIAS. Cults adopt techniques like self-reinforcing circular logic to disorient, overload, and confuse members in order to program new beliefs which confirm their existing biases. Platforms have personalized feeds, which result in information silos that confirm what users already believe. LEVERAGING FEAR OF LEAVING. Cults use phobia indoctrination - the irrational fear that leaving will cause bad things to happen - to keep members from leaving. Social media algorithms "push" interactions from friends and family, leveraging the fear of missing out (FOMO) for not participating. ABUSING PARTIAL TRUTHS. Cults embrace partial truths to create convincing narratives that align with their goals. Social media algorithms amplify the most engaging content - even if it's misinformation. RELYING ON LOADED LANGUAGE. Cults construct group member's thoughts along binary lines, reducing complexities and using phrases meant to close the discussion in favor of the cult's agenda, e.g., the science is settled. Bots and internet trolls maximize engagement by propagating thought- terminating cliches, e.g., that's just mainstream media, in order to stop the expansion of knowledge. INCREMENTAL INFLUENCE. Cults practice incremental recruitment and indoctrination - they "meet members where they are" by lying, withholding or distorting information, and slowly introducing more extreme ideas. Social media algorithms that maximize engagement use pacing and leading - they show users content they want which intersects with more extreme content, sending them "down a rabbit hole" of increasingly extreme ideas. WEAPONIZING AWAKENING. Cults use terms like "awakening" to take advantage of members' motivations (e.g., self-discovery or world improvement) and convince them that members are "awake" to the "right way" while others are not. Social media algorithms that maximize engagement end up proliferating content that encourages people to think they're un-programmable, for example, with the terms "woke" and "red pill" We’d like to thank Dr. Steven Hassan, expert in undue influence, who informed, guided the creation, and reviewed this graphic. You can learn more about Dr. Hassan’s work at www.freedomofmind.com Center for Humane Technology humanetech.com
Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis.”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”
PBS – HACKING YOUR MIND – Living on Autopilot – Episode 101 – Aired: 09/09/20It’s especially hard to overcome our autopilot biases because, much of the time, we’re not even aware we’re experiencing them. For instance, here’s an autopilot bias I can almost guarantee you’re not aware of — being biased in favor of one person over many people. One of Kahneman and Tversky’s closest colleagues studies how that bias distorts the decisions we make.
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." - carl sagan the demon-haunted world 1995
