I don't want to write about Facebook. You already know the effect social media has on your attention span, and that posts which arouse prejudice and outrage get more likes and shares. If you're like everyone else, you realize from time to time that you should be doing better things with your life, so you deactivate or stop checking your account for awhile, only to crawl back to the feet of Zuckerberg a few weeks later. You know that Facebook doesn't give a damn about your privacy, but you just can't stay away. Perhaps you even recognize this for what it is: carefully-engineered addiction. Social Media Disorder. Maybe even you've seen a therapist for it, and made some progress in curbing your addiction. If so, you deserve to be commended.
But that's not what I'm interested in exploring, because the problem has shifted from an individual and psychological one to a societal and existential one. If you were on Facebook in 2015-2016 and voted for Donald Trump (or for Leave, if you're reading this from the UK), you were likely co-opted by Russian trolls and bots over the course of 18 months in 2015-2016. Hostile Russian intelligence services recruited millions of American citizens into fake online "communities" which spread misinformation and succeeded in driving the narrative of the 2016 election. But this may be old news to you too, and it's also not what I want to write about.
What I want to communicate today is twofold. The first is that healthy civil dialogue in free societies around the world (the US, the UK, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea) rests on the foundation of shared facts. And in the era of manipulable mass digital media, this is the soft underbelly of free societies that is being exploited. Donald Trump's never-ceasing torrent of verbal and written misinformation is Exhibit A. Though thoughtful folk like you and me would like to ignore his ravings, that's exactly the attitude that contributed to his election. Donald Trump and his lie machine can be hated, resisted, and (with persistence) corrected at every turn, but they cannot be ignored. He has muddied the very concept of truth by repeating the phrase "fake news" ad nauseum in reference to information very much grounded in reality, while promoting a constant flood of genuinely fake news. And to those of you who may be rusty on your history, allow me to remind you: this is always the first step towards fascism. Mussolini and Hitler are the first to come to mind, but it's also a tactic Vladimir Putin employed eight years ago as he transitioned Russian society into a full-fledged authoritarian oligarchy... around the same time he was funneling millions of dirty rubles into The Trump Organization, coincidently. But I digress.
The attacks on our information systems have no doubt already started to evolve into more sophisticated techniques as Twitter, Facebook, and the government crack down on first-generation misinformation techniques. As Renee DiResta puts it in her article linked below,
Algorithmic distribution systems will always be co-opted by the best resourced or most technologically capable combatants. Soon, better AI will rewrite the playbook yet again — perhaps the digital equivalent of Blitzkrieg in its potential for capturing new territory. AI-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation. Authenticity debates will commandeer media cycles, pushing us into an infinite loop of perpetually investigating basic facts. Chronic skepticism and the cognitive DDoS [digital denial of service, a type of cyberattack] will increase polarization, leading to a consolidation of trust in distinct sets of right and left-wing authority figures – thought oligarchs speaking to entirely separate groups.
Which brings me to my second point: the theater of this "warm war" is the minds of (currently) free citizens like you and me. Being a war of misinformation and manipulation, it depends on us plugging in and reading, watching, or listening to content generated by fascists (state-supported, homegrown, or both). This is the soft underbelly of the fascist cyberwarriors. If enough citizens wake up, unplug from the torrent of misinformation, and plug into genuine news outlets with legitimate journalists and editorial boards, the fascist cyberwar machine will starve.
This requires each of us to become more circumspect and sophisticated in our consumption of media. Gone is the era when you could blithely scroll your news feed and repost pictures or articles that strike your fancy. We are all going to have to put forth some cognitive effort in evaluating what we consume. Of course, the government also has a giant role it must fulfill. As Renee DiResta puts it,
We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.
The solution to this problem requires collective responsibility among military, intelligence, law enforcement, researchers, educators, and platforms. Creating a new and functional defensive framework requires cooperation.
It’s time to prioritize frameworks for multi-stakeholder threat information sharing and oversight. The government has the ability to create meaningful deterrence, to make it an unquestionably bad idea to interfere in American democracy and manipulate American citizens. It can revamp national defense doctrine to properly contextualize the threat of modern information operations, and create a whole-of-government approach that’s robust regardless of any new adversary, platform, or technology that emerges. And it can communicate threat intelligence to tech companies.
Technology platforms, meanwhile, bear much of the short-term responsibility. They’re the first line of defense against evolving tactics, and have full visibility into what’s happening in their corner of the battlespace. And, perhaps most importantly, they have the power to moderate as they see fit, and to set the terms of service. For a long time, the platforms pointed to “user rights” as a smokescreen to justify doing nothing. That time is over. They must recognize that they are battlespaces, and as such, must build the policing capabilities that limit the actions of malicious combatants while protecting the actual rights of their real civilian users.
If that sounds like a tall order for a government crippled by hyperpartisanship and giant technology companies defined by their short-sighted leadership and toxic cultures, I'm with you. But you can do one thing: #deletefacebook.
If you're not motivated enough to quit social media for your own privacy and well-being, perhaps the realization that Russian-backed fascists are using it in an attempt to destabilize our society will outrage you enough to do something. But deleting Facebook is only the start. The foundation of a free society is public discourse with shared facts, and that is under attack. So start spreading the word, and wake people up to the situation we face. Fact check your sources. Stop being lazy. Freedom itself depends on it.
For further reading:
