14 December 2019 (Paris, France) – In the just concluded United Kingdom election, politicians used disinformation techniques to grab attention, distract the news media, stoke outrage and rally support. As chronicled by the The Guardian, The New York Times, The Verge, Vox many others, British voters were pummeled with manipulated Twitter accounts, doctored videos, dodgy websites and questions of foreign meddling. It was a taste of what the dark arts of online campaigning have to offer. And it is a preview of what’s to come in the United States in 2020 (in fact, what is happening now) as more public and political figures engage in misinformation to support (and compete with) Trump. As Adam Satariano and Amie Tsang explained in a recent piece in the The New York Times:
Polls suggest that voters are shrugging off accusations of online trickery, as Facebook has said it will not screen political ads for accuracy. Experts said this means the tactics were likely to further enter the mainstream in Britain and elsewhere.
The British and U.S. elections are the point where disinformation has been normalized. A few years ago people were looking for a massive coordinated campaign from a hostile state actor. Legislators were incensed. Now, many more actors from all public and political streams are getting involved so the hostile state actor point is almost mute. Legislating against disinformation, fake news? Good luck.
And even mainstream media outlets are in on the game. Forget Fox News. In the UK, the BBC certainly showed its Conservative Party preference. Its main political correspondent, Laura Kuenssberg, was a master. She sent out numerous incendiary Tweets targeting Labour based on rumors that she didn’t bother to fact-check but which 100s did check. She showed us the new trick in the dark ops bag: the ruse to spread disinformation and then coyly get away with it by “apologizing” after it has gone viral, knowing the apology never gets close to the distribution of the original toxic belch. Disinformation success.
But let’s just face it. We live in a political system (at least in the UK and the US) that is (A) immoral, (B) shameless, (C) believes that winning is everything, and (D) has no concern whatsoever about the long term effects of its actions on the general population and even the stability of the country … so pretty much anything goes, anything becomes possible.
My long-time friend and colleague, Jim Gleason, a digital analyst at the advertising, marketing, and public relations agency Ogilvy, follows political marketing.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Ogilvy subsidizes my trips to Cannes Lions every year
Jim has spent years looking at ad targeting, data mining and social media manipulation. He told me all of these parties and politicians are developing strategies to win “the battle of the thumbs” The game is not played with facts or cogent arguments but approaches to push emotional buttons that elicit a response online. We’re talking anger, excitement, pride, fear. As Jim said “the content needs to relate to one of those emotions. Something someone really gives a damn about.”
And make it relatable. I spent an afternoon with him in the Ogilvy office here in Paris and he showed me many of the tricks of the trade and how he tracks activity on the toxic web. He showed me one British firm that is well-known for developing “boomer memes” – low-quality, scrappily produced ads that reiterate simple messages by pasting them onto images from popular shows such as “Game of Thrones.” They have armies of people who watch headlines, read news reports, and pop out a meme that distributes across social media.
But it is more insidious than that. In a series of articles I wrote last year and this year I talked about what I called “The Pathology of Social Media”, especially Twitter. Thanks to the witchcraft of social media feed ranking and Retweets, something comes to the attention of the paid “crusaders” (in 2016 the Republican Party had 500 in a review center in Texas; they now have thousands located across the U.S. and Europe) who plant themselves across social media, bullhorn in hand, picking up every mistake made by the opposition (or just making stuff up about the opposition), hoping to rouse the mob in the pursuit of the opposition’s extinction. These are paid stone-throwers and flame-throwers.
And I realize this is all part of something larger, beyond the scope of this post. We’re coming to the end of what might be called the anti-democracy decade. It began on 21 January 2010 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money in politics with the absurd claim that the first amendment protects corporate speech. It ends with Donald Trump in the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting foreign powers to interfere in American elections.
NOTE: people forget that Citizens United itself is a corporate front group, funded by the Koch Brothers. In 2008 it sought to broadcast TV ads for a film criticizing Hillary Clinton, in direct violation of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which barred corporations from buying ads mentioning candidates immediately preceding elections.
If you haven’t, read the full Supreme Court opinion. It is … well, remarkable. Justice Anthony Kennedy – defying all logic and reason – declared for the court that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption”.
The internet used to be a vast and wondrous place. It was fun. It began simply as a giant data set, a contextless compendium of information consulted via websearch, a query to fill whatever momentary gnaw had interrupted your day. Once the internet evolved past the novelty of communicating over distance, it found value in experience. Forums proliferated, naturally subdividing so that people congregated around shared interests or life events.
But like everything else in life, the scale and greed of countless culprits took over and they spun the internet geologic clock backward. A realm that once comprised countless nations became a supercontinent, a monolith of homogenized use and mood. We ended up with “hell sites” (Facebook and Reddit and Twitter and 4chan to name but four), not web sites, that manage to be more existentially unsatisfying everyday, manipulating our traditional knowledge ecosystem.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
At the start of the year I will publish a more detailed brief on the mechanics of this disinformation machine so herein a few brief points.
Yes, I know. The notion that “deceptive ads” and “disinformation” are a new phenomenon is absurd. Our politicians have embraced disinformation for decades: the picture of a nuclear bomb going off in the background while little girl picked flowers (the Johnson/Goldwater U.S. presidential contest in 1964; anybody remember that one?), or the Spanish American war; or those WMDs in Iraq. For God’s sake, Thomas Jefferson backed a fake news newspaper 219 years ago.
Politicians have used the media to make outrageous, misleading or completely false statements about political opponents for years. In fact, I will state, at the risk of being labeled a heretic, that such statements effected the 2016 U.S. presidential election exponentially more than any Russian interference. Yet, we point the finger outward to deflect attention away from our own disgraceful behavior.
And, yes, it will go on and on. But social media will be considered the curse of our age. Its amplification of this disinformation is unparalleled. That oxygen of amplification has completely reconfigured the information and media landscape. In fact, the internet overall, in spite of its usefulness for valid information (when you can assess validity) probably does more harm than good. It has done more to doom real learning, information gathering in depth and critical thinking than any other factor I can think of (including budget cuts to education).
It is why people that use the Cambridge Analytica story as a way to undermine Brexit or the Trump vote are missing the key, key point: people’s trust in elections and the long-term effect of profiling and micro-targeting on politics is that the whole of politics and much of life has been reduced to a data science of manipulation. Societal worry about algorithms and nudges online should focus ahead ten years as these data systems improve. These powerful machines (and they are machines) have resulted in our collective self slowly losing the practice and ability to think for ourselves, as we cease to act as moral agents.
