Life in the age of disinformation

Just look at a few recent examples:

• The Conservative Party rebranded one of its social media accounts as a fact-checking site.

• The Conservatives set up a fake website pretending to contain Labour’s manifesto when it was actually a vehicle for Tory talking points.

• The LibDems distributed fake newspapers with names similar to real publications.

• The SNP was prevented from distributing a leaflet about Jo Swinson on the grounds a statement in it was false in substance, materially inaccurate and defamatory.

• Labour Party members are pushing false anti-Semitic tropes. Conservatives are pushing false Islamophobic tropes.

• In American, Republicans are claiming Ukraine not Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. It’s a lie propagated by Russian intelligence.

• The Conservative Party doctored a video of Labour’s Keir Starmer to make it look as if he was dithering over Brexit.

The list could go on … and on. On the evidence, from a UK perspective, the Conservatives are by far the worst offenders. Disinformation now seems to be integral to the party’s election strategy. The Conservatives have just issued candidates with guidance on how to discredit rivals using misleading claims, like accusing LibDems of pushing sex work as a career for schoolchildren.

Internationally, we know America is soaked in fake news. The President lies daily. But this is a global problem and it affects all political parties. Disinformation is everywhere – Indonesia, Hungary, Poland, Italy, France, Russia. In Australia, across Africa, throughout Latin America and Asia.

Our world is now one where reality has been undermined, where politicians have manipulated the truth to such an extent that it’s hard to know what to believe anymore.

How did we get here? Fittingly, given that Russia has been blamed for much of the world’s disinformation, the term was coined by Joseph Stalin. Former Romanian spy chief Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to America during the Cold War, says Stalin preferred the word "disinformation" to the Russian term "maskirovka", meaning "disguise", because it sounded French. That meant the strategy could be blamed on the west – a feat of brilliant disinformation in itself.

The Soviets might have formalised the concept but the strategy of lying to one’s enemy has been around as long as humanity. The Trojan Horse could perhaps be seen as the first use of lies as part of a military strategy.

There’s a world of difference between misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is the mistaken distribution of falsehoods – like a journalist publishing material which they believe is correct. Early reports linking vaccines to autism are a good example. Disinformation is the deliberate distribution of lies. And at its heart disinformation isn’t just about lying, it’s about eating away at the very fabric of the truth until the public doubts everything. It’s a corrosive strategy designed to create chaos.

Russian interference in American politics is the best example of modern disinformation. So-called troll farms, linked to the Russian state, created social media accounts designed to disrupt American society. One troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), run out of St Petersburg by an associate of Putin, set up accounts both supporting Black Lives Matter, and opposing Black Lives Matter. Troll farms used similar tactics in relation to other divisive "culture war" issues, and the presidential election.

The idea is to sow enough discord and chaos that you’re in control and no-one else. The outcome for the Kremlin was the deepest divisions in US society since the Civil War and victory for a president seemingly more inclined to Russia than America’s traditionally allies. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence in America cited evidence that the IRA “started to advocate” for Trump “as early as December 2015”.

IRA staff post comments on newspaper websites and social media attacking those deemed targets. When Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered one whistleblower inside the IRA said trolls were told to spread confusion about who was behind his death.

Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics – he’s also Britain’s leading authority on disinformation, and the author of the new book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality. He says the goal of Russian trolls was “to make Americans hate each other”. Thousands of fake accounts posed as either “right-nationalist, gun-loving Americans who supported the election of Donald Trump” or “black civil rights campaigners who promoted the idea that his rivals weren’t worth voting for”. Their posts were shared by more than 30 million Americans.

Some analysts believe the world will look back on Russia’s cyber activity in decades to come and see it as the greatest intelligence operation ever conducted. Russia isn’t some rogue state when it comes to disinformation, it’s just the best – using it to settle old scores from the loss of the Cold War. The US ran fake online accounts in the Middle East. UK intelligence ran a disinformation campaign to build the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Russia has also interfered in UK politics. The British people will have to wait until after the General Election, however, to read the report into Kremlin meddling as it is being withheld by Johnson’s government.

The biggest catalyst for the tsunami of disinformation washing over the world is social media like Facebook, and its unregulated gush of fake news. To Pomerantsev, we live in a world of “mass persuasion run amok”. Cambridge Analytica is the poster child for this brave new world.

“More information was supposed to mean more freedom to stand up to the powerful,” he says, “but it’s also given them new ways to crush and silence dissent. More information was supposed to mean a more informed debate, but we seem less capable of deliberation than ever.”

Disinformation is now systematised and professionalised. Two academics, Dr Jonathan Corpus Ong of Massachusetts University and Dr Jason Cabanes of Leeds University studied what they termed "the architects of networked disinformation" in the Philippines. At the top there’s the chief architects – PR firms and advertisers – who work for political parties. Then there’s the paid influencers; and at the bottom there’s the "fake account operators" – this is what Pomerantsev describes as “call centres full of people ... paid by the hour, with one person manning dozens of social media personas”.

Such phoney personas repeat messages we’re all familiar with – the media shouldn’t be trusted; this paper should be boycotted; that politician is a traitor. Whether you’re in Glasgow or Chicago, the mantra of disinformation is the same and it’s designed to shatter trust and sow division.

Just 20 or so fake accounts can reach millions. Pomerantsev cites one account – @Ivan226622. They posted 1518 times in a week about politics in the Philippines. Previously, they posted about Iran, Syria and Catalonia – using Spanish language stories from Russian media.

We see similar tactics playing out in the UK over Brexit and Scottish independence. Anonymous accounts target politicians, journalists or public figures – maybe for being anti-Brexit or anti-independence – and subject them to an onslaught of abuse.

Disinformation is all about control, says Pomerantsev. The idea is to “surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible to prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative … The end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything”.

In Mexico, phoney accounts infiltrated the online world of anti-government protestors and began manipulating them – at one point directing them towards police lines, and spreading fake stories of looting and rioting.

These trolls, says Pomerantsev, can “create the simulation of a climate of opinion, of support or hate”. This simulation then becomes reinforced as people modify their behaviour “to fall in line with what they thought was reality”. In other words, if enough phoney accounts make it seem as if a certain person or organisation is bad or dangerous – or a certain politician good – then eventually that idea goes mainstream. The idea becomes reality, even though it’s a lie.

Information war is now replacing conventional warfare. The casualties from any war involving the big powers would be unthinkable. But an information war between the east and west costs no lives, and can be even more effective than combat in terms of strategic success. Why spend billions on fighter jets when a few hundred thousand can get you a staff of trolls to undermine your opponent. Janis Berzins of the Latvian Military Academy describes this as “a shift from direct annihilation of the opponent to its inner decay”.

Sometimes the information war goes hand in hand with conventional war – as in Ukraine – and sometimes it reaches levels of bizarre absurdity. Pomerantsev tells of pro-Ukrainian online activists putting out false stories that “a battalion of gay fascists from Holland” was coming to attack pro-Russian separatists, who panicked when they heard the claims.

A lot of online disinformation strategy is designed to make the enemy seem foolish. So many fake news stories come in the shape of memes. The alt-right has made it part of its stock-in-trade to provoke laughter against opponents. That’s where put-downs like "snowflake" and "libtard" come from.

There’s a knowing grin on the faces of many politicians these days too. They don’t take their lies seriously anymore. Many defenders of Donald Trump say his critics shouldn’t take his lies to heart – he’s only joking. Boris Johnson doesn’t face consequences for behaviour which would have finished any political career just a few years ago. This all becomes part of the disinformation feedback loop – lies are so ubiquitous that they no longer seem to matter.

“When Vladimir Putin went on international television during his army’s annexation of Crimea and asserted with a smirk, that there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea, when everyone knew there were, and later, just as casually, admitted that they had been there, he wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts don’t matter,” Pomerantsev explains.

In Russia, the public is saturated with disinformation making it impossible to discern what’s true. The state even helped create anti-Kremlin organisations to give it some control over the protest movement. Russians are told Americans developed the Zika virus. If the state addles the public mind enough eventually you can tell people anything and get away with it.

So when Kremlin agents attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a double agent who worked for British intelligence, with nerve agent in Salisbury, Russia can claim it was all staged by MI6. The truth has been so undermined internationally that even many Brits believed the lie. The same is true of Russian disinformation put out against the White Helmets in Syria – volunteers who saved lives after Syrian and Russian air raids. It was claimed they were either linked to terrorists or the atrocity sites they were attending were fake.

Of course, we’re all personally to blame for this if we consume lies. We know – or at least should know – that online algorithms feed us more of what we already consume. So if we watch conspiracy videos, or read fake news, we’ll just be served up more. If we ingest phoney garbage instead of hunting out reputable news sources, then we’re responsible for the proliferation of disinformation.

Many of us have retreated into our echo chambers and Twitter bubbles, preferring confirmation bias to information that challenges us. As Pomerantsev says: “It’s a lamentable loop: social media drives more polarised behaviour, which leads to demands for more sensationalised content, or plain lies. ‘Fake news’ is a symptom of the way social media is designed.”

Social media and the ongoing disinformation war have now reached tipping point in terms of damage to the public good. Until recently, political opponents were able to share a common ground over what was or wasn’t fact. Differing sides might disagree on economic or social policy – but no-one argued over what constituted an empirical truth. Now, as Michael Gove says, “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Or as Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway claims, there’s nothing wrong with “alternative facts”.

Is this why traditional politics has collapsed? Why voters are no longer driven by left-right ideology, but by identity? If everything seems a lie, then maybe you can only trust yourself and others like you. The result of that thinking is to break the world down into two camps – us and them. And therein lies the rise of populism which is sweeping the west and imperilling democracy.

As the UK parliamentary committee investigating disinformation and fake news found: “We have always experienced propaganda and politically-aligned bias, which purports to be news, but this activity has taken on new forms and has been hugely magnified by information technology and the ubiquity of social media.

“In this environment, people are able to accept and give credence to information that reinforces their views, no matter how distorted or inaccurate, while dismissing content with which they do not agree as ‘fake news’.

“This has a polarising effect and reduces the common ground on which reasoned debate, based on objective facts, can take place. Much has been said about the coarsening of public debate, but when these factors are brought to bear directly in election campaigns then the very fabric of our democracy is threatened.”