Posts Tagged ‘propaganda’
“What shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”*…
A.W. Ohlheiser on a new book, Invisible Rulers— an investigation of the ways in which technology has transformed power and influence– by Renée DiResta, a leader of the late, lamented Stanford Internet Observatory…
… The book examines and contextualizes how bad information and “bespoke realities” became so powerful and prominent online. She charts how the “collision of the rumor mill and the propaganda machine” on social media helped to form a trinity of influencer, algorithm, and crowd that work symbiotically to catapult pseudo-events, Twitter Main Characters, and conspiracy theories that have captured attention and shattered consensus and trust.
DiResta’s book is part history, part analysis, and part memoir, as it spans from pre-internet examinations of the psychology of rumor and propaganda to the biggest moments of online conspiracy and harassment from the social media era. In the end, DiResta applies what she’s learned in a decade of closely researching online disinformation, manipulation, and abuse, to her personal experience of being the target of a series of baseless accusations that, despite their lack of evidence, prompted Rep. Jim Jordan, as chair of the House subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, to launch an investigation.
There’s a really understandable instinct that, I think, a lot of people have when they read about online misinformation or disinformation: They want to know why it’s happening and who is to blame, and they want that answer to be easy. Hence, meme-ified arguments about “Russian bots” causing Trump to win the presidential election in 2016. Or, perhaps, pushes to deplatform one person who went viral by saying something wrong and harmful. Or the belief that we can content-moderate our way out of online harms altogether.
DiResta’s book explains why these approaches will always fall short. Blaming the “algorithm” for a dangerous viral trend might feel satisfying, but the algorithm has never worked without human choice. As DiResta writes, “virality is a collective behavior.” Algorithms can surface and nudge and entangle, but they need user data to do it effectively…
…
…So, what would work?
DiResta’s ideas for this echo conversations that have been happening among misinformation experts for some time. There are some things platforms absolutely should be doing from a moderation standpoint, like removing automated trending topics, introducing friction to engaging with some online content, and generally giving users more control over what they see in their feeds and from their communities. DiResta also notes the importance of education and prebunking, which is a more preventative version of addressing false information that focuses on the tactics and tropes of online manipulation. Also, transparency…
Misinformation: “Why lying on the internet keeps working,” @abbyohlheiser in @voxdotcom.
DiResta on her experience of harassment while at the Internet Observatory: “My Encounter with the Fantasy-Industial Complex” (gift article)
For more on prebunking, see “Fact or Fake? The role of knowledge neglect in misinformation” (source of the image above.
Also apposite: “Is social media fueling political polarization?“
On the other hand, there’s this consideration of misinformation in the larger epistemological context of all of the information available to us: “How Dangerous is Misinformation?“: “The problem with alarmism about “misinformation” is not that it is too pessimistic about the state of media and public discourse. The problem is that it is not pessimistic enough.” Caveat lector.
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we steel ourselves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1947 that Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO sighting; Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier (in Washington State) at speeds that he estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour.
His was the first post-World War II sighting in the United States that attracted nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first of the modern era of UFO sightings– including numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks. Arnold’s description of the objects led the press quickly to coin the terms flying saucer and flying disc as popular descriptive terms for UFOs.
After the 1947 UFO sighting, Arnold became famous “practically overnight.” Arnold’s daughter would later recall the family receiving 10,000 letters and constant phone calls. In the 1960’s Arnold entered politics, running as a Republican for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho. He lost to the Democratic incumbent.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history”*…
… and of their present. Anne Applebaum explores the ways in which autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world…
… Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.
Like the demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin in Russia that began in 2011, the 2014 street protests in Venezuela, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the 2022 protests in China help explain something else: why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it…
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… the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language…
…the convergence of what had been disparate authoritarian influence projects is still new. Russian information-laundering and Chinese propaganda have long had different goals. Chinese propagandists mostly stayed out of the democratic world’s politics, except to promote Chinese achievements, Chinese economic success, and Chinese narratives about Tibet or Hong Kong. Their efforts in Africa and Latin America tended to feature dull, unwatchable announcements of investments and state visits. Russian efforts were more aggressive—sometimes in conjunction with the far right or the far left in the democratic world—and aimed to distort debates and elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Still, they often seemed unfocused, as if computer hackers were throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see which crazy story might stick. Venezuela and Iran were fringe players, not real sources of influence.
Slowly, though, these autocracies have come together, not around particular stories, but around a set of ideas, or rather in opposition to a set of ideas. Transparency, for example. And rule of law. And democracy. They have heard language about those ideas—which originate in the democratic world—coming from their own dissidents, and have concluded that they are dangerous to their regimes…
The origins and the operations of today’s all-too-successful authoritarian disinformation efforts: “The New Propaganda War” (gift article) from @anneapplebaum in @TheAtlantic. Eminently worth reading in full.
Apposite: “‘Everyone is absolutely terrified’: Inside a US ally’s secret war on its American critics,” @zackbeauchamp on India’s campaign to threaten and discredit critics of the Modi regime, in @voxdotcom. Plus: “India’s YouTubers take on Narendra Modi” (gift link to @TheEconomist).
* George Orwell
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As we analyze agitprop, we might recall that it was on this date in 1998 that Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 for failing to warn authorities about the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Carried out by right-wing (white supremacist- and militia-sympathizing) anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing (on April 19, 1995, at 9:02 AM) killed 168 people, injured 680, and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings and caused an estimated $652 million worth of damage. It was the deadliest act of terrorism in U.S. history before the September 11 attacks in 2001, and still the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
McVeigh had shared his plans with Fortier (his Army roommate); Fortier had accompanied McVeigh on a scouting trip to the building in advance of the blast; and Fortier had failed to warn officials of the attack.
“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”*…
Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression more than a third were “killed.” As we wrestle with the stories we’re being told, an update of an earlier post…
From his office at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., Roy Stryker saw, time and again, the reality of the Great Depression, and the poverty and desperation gripping America’s rural communities. As head of the Information Division and manager of the FSA’s photo-documentary project, his job was to hire and brief photographers, and then select images they captured for distribution and publication. His eye helped shape the way we view the Great Depression, even today.
Professionally, Stryker was known for two things: preserving thousands of photographs from being destroyed for political reasons, and for “killing” lots of photos himself. Negatives he liked were selected to be printed. Those he didn’t—ones that didn’t fit the narrative and perspective of the FSA at the time, perhaps—were met with the business end of hole punch, which left gaping black voids in place of hog’s bellys, industrial landscapes, and the faces of farmworkers.
In 1935, the Resettlement Administration (RA) was established as part of the New Deal to provide relief, recovery, and reform to rural areas. The FSA, created in 1937, was its spiritual successor. The FSA’s duties included, but were not limited to, operating camps for victims of the Dust Bowl, setting up homestead communities, and providing education to more than 400,000 migrant families. Communicating about its efforts was also part of its mandate…
Stryker sought out photographers, among them Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Arthur Rothstein, and made their images readily available to the press. Given the lack of new photography and art being produced during the Great Depression, the photos regularly appeared in magazines such as LIFE and Look. He also had them displayed at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, the 1936 World’s Fair, the Museum of Modern Art, and other prominent venues. The publication of a series of early photographs, including Lange’s Migrant Mother, proved instrumental in pushing the federal government to provide emergency aid to migrant workers in California.
In the effort to represent the FSA and Roosevelt’s signature domestic achievement in a positive light, the chosen photos captured how the idealistic views of farm life were being tainted by poverty, and how the FSA programs were helping farmers reclaim their dignity. Common elements were decrepit housing conditions, the lack of food and clean water, and harsh work environments.
It was government propaganda, and there were certainly some within the government (both supporters and detractors) who saw it that way, and more who considered both the FSA and its photography project as communist and un-American. In a 1972 Interview, Stryker admits to having felt political pressure from the Department of Agriculture to portray the effectiveness of the New Deal. “Go to hell,” was his response. His photographers “were warned repeatedly not to manipulate their subjects in order to get more dramatic images, and their pictures were almost always printed without cropping or retouching.”
But there is a way to manipulate the story being told without altering the images themselves—the process of photo editing, of choosing which images to highlight and which to discard…
The fascinating story of one man’s (materially successful) effort to galvanize social and political opinion: “How a Hole Punch Shaped Public Perception of the Great Depression.”
See also “The Kept and the Killed.”
And for an equally-fascinating consideration of how emerging new visual technologies might similarly be used to sway sentiment, read Fred Turner‘s “The Politics of Virtual Reality.”
* Richard Avedon
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As we contemplate cuts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that the first Social Security check– for $22.54– was issued to Ida May Fuller.
The Social Security Program had been created in 1935, with qualification for eligibility (covered earnings) beginning in 1937. So Ms. Fuller, a teacher-turned legal-secretary, had been accumulating credit for three years. She lived to 100 years old and collected a total of $22,888.
“This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy”*…
A hundred years ago a new theory about human nature was put forth by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered he said, primitive and sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings. Forces which if not controlled led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction.
This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.
But the heart of the series is not just Sigmund Freud but other members of the Freud family.
This episode is about Freud’s American nephew Edward Bernays. [See here.]
Bernays is almost completely unknown today but his influence on the 20th century was nearly as great as his uncles. Because Bernays was the first person to take Freud’s ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations for the first time how to they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Out of this would come a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying people’s inner selfish desires one made them happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate our world today…
From the introduction to Adam Curtis‘ remarkable 2002 BBC documentary series, Century of Self, all-too-relevant today– how propaganda, marketing and advertising, political messaging, management techniques all “flowered” from Freud’s seed.
Here is a complete transcript of the series.
Readers can find the (riveting) documentaries themselves at:
Hypernormalization, Curtis’ 2016 BBC (sort of) sequel is here.
And keep an eye peeled for What Is It That’s Coming, a (tentatively-titled series, projected at nine parts) on which he’s currently at work.
* Adam Curtis
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As we sort signal from noise, we might consider just how far we have– and haven’t– come, as it was on this date in 1859 that Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Actually, on that day he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the title was shortened to the one we know with the sixth edition in 1872.
“Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology”*…
Snippet of the detailed memo outlining the program for Operation PBSuccess. The CIA outlines their objectives, their statement of the problem, and the six-stage playbook of the operation.
The United States was not at war with Guatemala in 1954. But the Boston-based conglomerate known as the United Fruit Company was at war with President Árbenz.
United Fruit (also known as UFCO) had been cheating on its taxes for years, lying to the Guatemalan government about the value of its banana plantations and the hundreds of thousands of acres of unused land the company was sitting on. Now that Árbenz had passed an agrarian reform bill (similar to those that had in decades past allowed countries like Ireland, Colombia and Canada to break agricultural monopolies and create more competition), Guatemala was buying back untilled land for the value that companies like UFCO had reported on its tax bill. UFCO was being forced to sleep in the bed they’d made, and they were pissed.
If only someone could get rid of Árbenz.
The most powerful pair of brothers in the United States, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, were not legally allowed to do that sort of thing. But they wanted to. Both were UFCO shareholders and advocates, having worked for the firm for many years. But in a time of peace, well, doing anything more aggressive than writing angry letters would be illegal.
The U.S. was, however, at symbolic “war” with Communism. Eisenhower had won the U.S. presidency on a campaign promise to stop its spread. And the Dulles brothers were particularly eager to help him do that. They held a deep religious belief that Jesus Christ had called on them to use their influence to spread American business interests across the world, while simultaneously beating back the Soviets. For decades, the United States had thrown its weight around Latin America when it suited the U.S. financially — such as seizing Puerto Rico from Spain and secretly helping Panama secede from Colombia. And in 1953, the U.S. successfully overthrew the Shah of Iran after he tried to nationalize oil. The success of that operation confirmed for the Dulleses that Communist prevention and American business interests were indeed a winning combination.
So, even though the U.S. State Department knew that Jacobo Árbenz was not a Communist, the Dulles brothers decided it was God’s plan to get rid of him.
This is not, strictly speaking, a legal justification for overthrowing a democratically elected leader of a nation. So the Dulleses decided to do so without anyone knowing about it.
According to declassified documents, Allen Dulles had as far back as July 1952 proposed putting together a private “syndicate” to fund Árbenz’s ouster. But after over a year of plotting, he and his brother got the official green light from Eisenhower to use U.S. tax funds to make Árbenz go away…
How the CIA hired an American actor and two radio DJs to launch a revolution and oust an elected President. thus creating a playbook being used in– and on– the U.S. today: “The (Literally) Unbelievable Story of the Original Fake News Network.”
* Joseph Goebbels
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As we watch what goes around come around, we might recall that it was on this date in 1833 that The (New York) Sun began publishing. It cost one penny (at a time when other papers were 5¢), was easy to carry, and it featured illustrations, crime reporting, and personal stories (suicides, deaths, and divorces), all of which made it popular with working-class readers. Indeed, it inspired a new genre across the nation, “the penny press,” which specialized in more “sensationalistic” content (e.g., “The Great Moon Hoax“). Still, for most of its run (until 1950) it was considered, with its two broadsheet competitors, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, a serious paper; The Sun was consistently the most politically conservative of the three.
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