FBI Director James Comey issued what should be a regularly repeated warning to the American public Wednesday night: Fake news is real and it’s ongoing.
“The most important thing to be done is people need to be aware of the possibility that what they’re reading has been shaped by troll farms looking to push a message on Twitter to undermine our confidence” about our politics and government, Comey said at the Newseum.
This needs to be repeated often, because I’m still not sure people get it or its implications.
More or less since the internet existed, it has hosted a variety of urban legends, rumors and other nonsense. It’s just been part of the environment online.
But what we’ve seen in recent years has been something more deliberate and sinister, and something which in many cases (though not all) was coming from an adversarial foreign power. I’m not sure that people have quite gotten their arms around the fact that what plagued the U.S. during the last election (and continues to do so today) was not garden variety internet bullshit but a long-term, and long-planned, psyops operation by the Russian government.
To be clear, fake news is just that: actually fabricated stories which are either wholly not grounded in fact or work in enough falsehoods as to be misleading. So the story published last fall suggesting that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump was fake; so was the story saying that Ireland was accepting anti-Trump refugees from the U.S.
Here’s what fake news is not: Fake news is not a story you don’t like, Mr. President; fake news is not a badly reported story; stories about polls you don’t like are not fake news (looking at you again, Trump), regardless of whether you have nits to pick with the methodology. No, the so-called “mainstream media” does not deliberately spread fake news (despite what people seem to think). Even if you’re convinced that The New York Times and The Washington Post are purveyors of biased journalism, understand that that’s different than fake news; ditto for, say, The New York Post and Fox News Channel. You might not like the stories they choose, the angles they take or their obvious politics. But they ain’t fake news.
Nevertheless people have taken to using the term with a Trumpian promiscuity – a term I use advisedly since he’s the highest profile abuser of the phrase – which is diminishing its meaning. And this is a problem. Fake news is a punchline but it’s also the product of – at the risk of repeating myself – a deliberate and elaborate foreign psychological warfare operation aimed at undermining our democracy.
Editorial Cartoons on Russian Hacking and the 2016 Election
It didn’t start with the election either. Here’s what Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last month about Russian “active measures” in the fake news space: “In late 2014 and throughout 2015 we watched active measures on nearly any disaffected U.S. audience whether it be claims of the U.S. military declaring martial law during the Jade Helm exercise, chaos among the Black Lives Matter protesters or the standoff at the Bundy Ranch.”
The effort involves the use of both fabricated news sites (remember all those U.S. politics websites that suddenly popped up in Macedonia last year) and fake online personas, some of which were run by paid, human trolls and some of which were bots.
“The Russians employed thousands of paid internet trolls and bot nets to push out disinformation and fake news at high volume focusing this material onto your Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation. This fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach and potentially influence millions of Americans.” Watts, the former FBI agent, testified that the trolls and bots would work together to “further amplify … Russian propaganda amongst unwitting westerners.”
What did this look like in practice? Fake Twitter accounts featured profile keywords like “God, military, Trump, family, country, conservative, Christian, America and constitution.” As Watts put it: “If you inhale all the accounts of people in Wisconsin, you identify the most common terms in it, you just recreate accounts that look exactly like people from Wisconsin. So that way whenever you’re trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information is true it’s much more simple because you see everybody and they look exactly like you even down to the pictures.”
There’s a famous cartoon from The New Yorker in 1993 where a dog sitting at a computer is saying to another canine, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This year that maxim could be updated to say that on the internet nobody knows you’re a Russian bot.
The evolution of the interactive media ecosphere was critical for the development of these new information warfare techniques. The January paper I mentioned earlier from the Oxford Interent Institute compared traditional psyops operations with their counterparts in the developing generation. “Whereas earlier attempts to manipulate public opinion were expensive, slow, data poor and attributable, contemporary techniques are cheap, fast, data rich and difficult to attribute,” the authors wrote.
That’s why reports that Facebook has shut down 30,000 accounts which were spreading fake news in France ahead of that country’s presidential election are important. “The crackdown by Facebook represents a major shift in policy from only a few months ago, when the role of fake news in electoral politics came under scrutiny following Donald Trump’s surprise victory,” CNN’s Ivana Kottasova wrote Friday. “Immediately following the vote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was not responsible for influencing people’s votes. ‘Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook – of which it’s a small amount of content – influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,’ he said.”
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