(2017-02-24) Defense Against The Dark Arts Networked Propaganda

Jonathan Stray: Defense Against the Dark Arts: Networked Propaganda and Counter-Propaganda

Propaganda — that is, getting large numbers of people to believe something for political gain. Many of my journalist and technologist colleagues have started to think about propaganda in the wake of the US election, and related issues like “Fake News” and organized trolling. My goal here is to connect this new wave of enthusiasm to history and research.

Russia is a past master at disinformation, and their methods have evolved for the Internet era. The modern strategy has been dubbed “the firehose of falsehood” by RAND scholar Christopher Paul.

Even if a channel or individual propagandist changes accounts of events from one day to the next, viewers are likely to evaluate the credibility of the new account without giving too much weight to the prior, “mistaken” account, provided that there are peripheral cues suggesting the source is credible.

Dr. Paul suggests that the counter-strategy is not to try to refute the message, but to reach the target audience first with an alternative.

In this light, Facebook’s plan to show the fact check along with the article seems like a much better strategy than sending someone a fact checking link when they repeat a falsehood.

Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics

We infer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading.

Note that this is only one half of the Chinese media control strategy. There is still massive censorship around political events, especially of any post relating to organized protest.

But China has a tightly controlled media and the greatest censorship regime the world has ever seen. If you’re operating in a relatively free media environment, you have to manipulate the press instead.

The key tactic of alternative or provocative figures is to leverage the size and platform of their “not-audience” (i.e. their haters in the mainstream) to attract attention and build an actual audience.

But even if you’ve uncovered a deception, it’s not enough to say that someone else is lying. You have to tell a different story.

Debunking doesn’t work: provide an alternative narrative.

Repeating a lie in the process of refuting it may actually reinforce it! The counter strategy is to replace one narrative with another. Affirm, don’t deny:

The most successful propagandists, like the most successful protest movements, are very organized

The Russian approach of “many messages, many channels” suggests that an open, diverse network can succeed at individual propaganda actions, and I bet it would succeed at counter-propaganda actions too. But intelligence is different, and it’s an unanswered question whether the messy collection of journalists, NGOs, universities, and activists in an open society can do effective counter-propaganda intelligence

You have know what your propagandist adversary is doing, in detail and in real-time. If you don’t have that critical function taken care of, you’re going to be forever reactive, and you’re going to lose.