Popular Manipulation

Monday, July 8, 2024

Popular Manipulation

Matters of spying in the context of civilizational struggle are a reliable topic of entertainment. It’s fun to watch people being fooled, or to see them slowly comprehend they’re being had. It’s great drama when you’re in the audience, in the know.

But not so much in real life—and not when the strong implication is that we ourselves are the ones who are being fooled. At an individual level, there is hardly anything more offensive than confronting the fact that you might have been tricked into taking actions against your best interests to the benefit of others—even worse when those “others” are hostile. As it turns out, it is much more comforting to believe that we haven’t been fooled even in the face of subsequent evidence—and therefore we have a natural tendency to continue believing the falsehoods anyway. It costs the ego less than admitting you’re a sucker.

The more committed we are to our political positions, the more we recognize these failings, but only in our political opponents. We see how they are in denial of the facts, they are erroneously wedded to falsehoods. At the same time, we can be just as blind to the same faults in ourselves. The manipulators know they can rely on us to some extent to remain intentionally blind, unwittingly collaborating with our enemies.

A recent investigative reporting collaboration between the German newsweekly Der Spiegel and the online Russian spy reporting site The Insider presented evidence from within Russian military intelligence. The report describes how the Russian disinformation system works. One feature is that Putin’s spies are learning as they go, by figuring out what methods work and which ones don’t. They’ve switched tactics as they’ve learned, for instance, by reducing the use of their own national “news” outlets like Sputnik and Russia Today (RT) in favor of ready-made sites posing as American local news outlets.

The first step is to get the information out disguised as originating from within the American mainstream. The method is simple and straightforward: online advertising.

Fake advertisements disguised as news headlines, all crafted by SVR recruits, would be visible on most any desktop computer screen or mobile device used by target audiences in the West, luring them to click-through and land on “internet resources controlled by [Russian intelligence services].”

The next stage is getting legitimate users to click through to the bogus news sites, and augmenting the click numbers with paid clicks from online multipliers. That is, the fabled Russian troll factories create hundreds of dummy social media accounts that cite and repost online articles created by Kremlin intelligence services that are outright falsehoods. As the number of clicks increases, the disinformation begins to look all the more legitimate to search engines, and it gets picked up by media personalities, wittingly or not, and becomes legitimated.

The fake articles, pictures, and videos are from all parts of the political spectrum. A long-standing method is to take an anti-Kremlin political movement, infiltrate it with a few overly aggressive fake “activists”, and discredit the movement by driving it to extremes. The Soviets did a lot of this: finding ways to place radical agents provocateurs who would call for the most extreme actions, including terrorism and assassination. This method undermined legitimate causes by making them menacing and unacceptable to average citizens.

As for the purely online efforts of planting falsehoods into the mainstream news, the Russian intelligence services are not reinventing the wheel, so to speak. They are using the tools of online advertising and user response statistics to rate their own effectiveness. The online news cycle churns in such short intervals that falsehoods can spread far and wide before anyone has traced the sources to uncover fabrications. Public attention has moved on by the time journalistic corrections are issued.

The spooks have also learned that it isn’t just any heightened emotion that works, it is the emotion of fear above all that tends to impede rational thought. The report cites the intelligence documents:

The “leitmotif of our cognitive campaign in the [Western] countries is proposed to be the instilling of the strongest emotion in the human psyche — fear,” the document states. “It is precisely the fear for the future, uncertainty about tomorrow, the inability to make long-term plans, the unclear fate of children and future generations. The cultivation of these triggers floods an individual's subconscious with panic and terror.”

The project’s aim would be cumulative, yielding initial results in as few as four to five weeks and “medium-term comprehensive goals” in about three to six months. The SVR measures the former as the rejection of the status quo in liberal democracies and the European Union, complete with popular protests — no more than 100 people, each compensated by 100 euros each — against state and supranational institutions, all of them filmed and recorded for “subsequent media dissemination.” The medium-term goals consist of the discrediting of Ukraine and “the Nazis oriented towards it in the eyes of the collective West.”

It is a cost-effective multi-media method. Fake protesters are filmed being very loud and angry in small groups, film clips of their antics are posted online along with fake news reports at invented news outlets, and the troll armies post and repost the content all over social media to elevate the statistics. The social media algorithms read the fake clicks as popularity, and the fake stories spread—virally, they hope.

The method is clear, but the fix for it is less so. Having official or semi-official sites identify this propaganda does not necessarily work. The propagandists also use this method to undermine the analysis of legitimate authorities. Users trying to tease apart fact from fabrication are left uncertain, which can lead to resignation: another goal of hostile spy services’ propaganda work. Leaving citizens in a free society uncertain about what to believe paralyzes them about what to do.

Angry partisan squabbles make work easier for outside enemies, too. When domestic political opponents have the news sources they trust, which in turn try to undermine any trust in their opposites, all it takes is for the propagandists to pose as friendly to the side they aim to sway. There is a distinct absence in the present environment of sources that all or most partisans can agree are neutral arbiters of fact over fiction. Trust is not easy to reestablish broadly.

The harsh reality is that at present, America’s domestic political scene is a welcome playground for adversarial psychological influence operations. If nothing else, it is worth bearing this reality in mind. Media consumers should treat with skepticism news and information that increase excitement and emotion—especially fear. That just serves to make us more quiescent, more pliable.