More About Disinformation

Once again, I've collected links to several articles about misinformation and disinformation. Some of these are quite long, but very much worth taking the time to read. 

I'm going to start with a newsletter post from author Annalee Newitz, who has just published a book called Stories Are Weapons about the history of psychological operations, or psyops. Many modern disinformation campaigns fall into this category. If you read one article from this post, it should probably be this one. The post is titled "How to recognize a psyop in three easy steps".  Here's how it starts:

Psyops are everywhere, but not in the way that you might think. Here is a quick-and-dirty guide to recognizing these mind-warping weapons in the wild. 

As I discovered while researching my new book Stories Are Weapons, psychological warfare became a professional industry in the early twentieth century, modeled in part on the new field of public relations. The basic structure of an American psyop is cobbled together out of advertising techniques, pop psychology, and pulp fiction tropes. Using insights gleaned from these sources, the military spent the early years of the 20th century figuring out how to craft messages that can hurt, demoralize, and distract you. 

Then something terrible but predictable happened. Just as military equipment was transferred to civilian police forces during the 1990s, psyops found their way into the arsenals of culture warriors today. 

Unlike bombs, however, psyops can be dodged. Once you know what to look for, your brain can treat this cultural ordinance exactly the way your spam filter treats e-mails about CrYpT0 InVeStMeNt$ – it will throw them in your mental trashcan unread, so that you can focus on constructive information.

In a following newsletter post, she talks about two other psyop campaigns, both of which have had major effects. 

• The first was conducted by the US military in the Philippines in 2020 urging Filipinos not to use the Sinovac covid vaccine from China, and to avoid masks from Chinese manufacturers. This was particularly devastating for a country where the death toll from covid was tremendous, largely due to vaccine hesitancy." 
• The second is a right-wing campaign that resulted in the shutdown of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which "has done brilliant work studying the spread of dangerous content online, from covid misinformation to child sexual abuse material." 

The Washington Post (and other media outlets) reported on how right-wing media outlets are deceptively editing videos of President Biden to make him appear disoriented or senile. 

This past week, the RNC feed has misleadingly called attention to two video clips of Biden. One was so distorted that it resulted in a “community note” on the X platform calling out its dishonesty. But the RNC’s dismal track record — which we have highlighted on multiple occasions — has not stopped right-leaning outfits from echoing the RNC’s framing and reinforcing its narrative that Biden has lost a step.

It's a sad commentary on the current state of the news media that such blatant misrepresentations are being passed off a actual news by media outlets. 

Here's another example of disinformation, perhaps not as impactful, about videos and photos purporting to show US aircraft carriers being attacked in the Red Sea. However:

This video shows the USS Eisenhower docked at Pier 12 at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia in April 2023.

It was created by combining an image from Google Earth/Maps of the ship at dock & pasting a Shutterstock photo of a bullet hole over the flight deck as fake damage.

Here's an article about a major Russian campaign to influence news media in the West. 

“Please Check”. More than 800 organisations, among which many media outlets have been flooded with emails and social media mentions urging them to verify dubious claims undermining Ukraine, France and Germany for the most part. The issue is that these solicitations are part of a massive pro-Russian operation, still ongoing at the time of writing.

Finally, a long article from Wired about how programmatic advertising leads to the spread of misinformation. There's more going on than just ads that can load malware. The unintended consequences of the current system are wider and deeper than you might think.