The Role of Social Media in Election 2016

This past month I read and wrote about the book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer & Emerson T. Brooking. I found the book so eye-opening I felt compelled to ask for it for Christmas. The authors address a whole range of subjects related to the new media, but devote special attention to the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The degree to which social media has been in play in our elections is mind-boggling, and only now seems to have become apparent.

It's not like the 2016 election was the first to utilize social media influence. Obama was adept to a certain degree with the emerging possibilities of social media, as this Atlantic article notes. But that was all warm-up compared to election 2016.

Very early on Hillary's army took to the trenches, making moves to gain an advantage. According to Nick Allen's article in The Telegraph, "Mrs Clinton employed more than 100 people in her digital team and spent tens of millions of dollars targeting millennials with a series of hi-tech messages on Facebook."

That sounds like a fairly hefty commitment, and on the surface appears sensible. Millennials are wedded to their devices, the pundits assume.

Her husband Bill, and I am not suggesting husbands are always right, encouraged her to spend money on blue collar workers in the Rust Belt states, which had been hurting since the 2008 recession. Hillary's digital teams pushed for the social media maneuver. Nick Allen proposes that this was a mistake.

In LikeWar, Singer and Brooking go into great detail as regards the Trump campaign's utilization of these tools. Donald Trump had spent a lifetime playing the media game. He was no newbie in this jungle. And he made his own rules. "With his Twitter loudspeaker, Trump could drive the national conversation at a pace and volume that left both journalists and his opponents scrambling to keep up," writes the authors. "It allowed him not just to dominate the web-borne portion of the 2016 election, but to dominate all other forms of media through it, thus capturing $5 billion dollars of 'free' media coverage (nearly twice that of Clinton)."

In addition to Twitter, where he continues to maintain a steady stream at @POTUS and @realDonaldTrump, he also has built a stadium-full of followers on the Reddit platform at /r/The_Donald.

All of these platforms provide opportunity for Meme-makers to create amusing, pointed images that often get extended play by going viral. The meme-teams are already busy producing blistering barbs about Elizabeth Warren.

John Heino Photography

If Reddit seems a chaotic Wild West, then it's only because it's unfamiliar to you. There are maps and outposts, and a posse for every Marshall Dillon. Marshall Donald did have an agenda, and the posse understood it, for it spoke to their anxieties and powerlessness, "standing strong against the forces of 'globalism,' aligning with many fervent conspiracy theories," write the authors. It was a digital army that never took furlough. They were always on their game, "endlessly available."

In the marketing game, there's a well-known technique for fine-tuning your marketing message called A/B testing. In A/B testing you run two versions of an ad and see which one gets better results. In this way you learn what connects and what does not connect with your audience.

The degree to which Donald Trump's team took this A/B testing is literally unbelievable, continuously fine tuning their messages over and over and over and over, to get it razor sharp. According to Singer & Brooking, "the Trump campaign had run almost 6 million different versions of online ads. Once, the number of variations on a single message approached 200,000."

Can you imagine? The effort to "get it right" was taken to a truly obsessional level.

Add into the mix that the messages are being targeted to persons whose data had been captured via Facebook and catalogued at Cambridge Analytica. They knew who they were talking to, and voters listened. Trump, despite being pretty much despised by the liberal media and a good portion of the general public, had a message that resonated with the voters that mattered, which is the unaligned, undecided voters in the middle.

What happens in 2020 will be anyone's guess. As a famous Nobel Laureate once wrote, and sang, The Times, They Are A-Changin'.

Meantime, I'll catch you on the flip side.

Related Links
Did you know that Hillary's campaign was nearly 20% more active on Facebook and Twitter than the Trump campaign? Read this insightful story on the Illuminating 2016 Project.
See how much the candidates spent on Facebook ads.

Audio Books of 2018: A Year In Review

It's that time of year. Magazines make lists of the top movies, most important books famous people who passed away, significant events and other such things. While looking over my past 11+ years of blogging I noticed how in 2010 I'd shared a list of audio books I'd listened to that year.

In case you haven't noticed, I like books. I like reading them, and when sufficiently motivated I like writing them. And, I especially enjoy sharing what I've been reading. So without further adieu, here are the audio books I have completed in 2018 (an exception is cited.) There have been at least two or three dozen additional audio books begun but abandoned for various reasons, most frequently because I did not want to remain in the company of the reader for one reason or another. Occasionally a book is so tedious it gets lost in the weeds, or rather its own minutia. And so, here is my list... (with hot links on those I have written about elsewhere.)

Audiobooks 2018

1. Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams

2. The Death of Ivan Ilyich . Tolstoy
This was my second reading. Am thinking I may read it again in 2019.

3. The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution . Walter Isaacson

4. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men . David Foster Wallace
Wallace is a great writer. Was not my favorite book.

5. A Lowcountry Heart [Reflections on a Writing Life] .  Pat Conroy
Made me feel I have been missing something by not reading him sooner.

6. Invisible Man . Ralph Ellison
Blown away by its power.. I read about one-third intending to finish later... which I must do.

7. Shane .  Jack Schaefer
A childhood favorite. Have read it a couple times over course of a lifetime. This was third time.

8. Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success . Phil Jackson
You can read the review.

9. In Their Lives [Great Writers On Great Beatles Songs]
Rewarding.

10. Both Flesh and Not [essays] . David Foster Wallace
Wallace is superb.

11. Murder in the Mews: Three Perplexing Cases for Poirot . Agatha Chistie

12. My Life in Middlemarch . Rebecca Mead
A original memoir, a unique approach to sharing the meanings of one's life experiences.

13. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . Kesey, Ken
Second reading, as I'd watched the film again this year. An incredible book.

14. Filthy Rich [A powerful billionaire, the sex scandal that undid him, and all the justice that money can buy : the shocking true story of Jeffrey Epstein] . James Patterson
How the other half live. That is, how justice is seldom served when it comes to people with power. Sad.

15. Endless Night . Agatha Christie

16. The Truth Matters : A citizen's guide to separating facts from lies and stopping fake news in its tracks . Bruce R. Bartlettought the paperback afterwards.
Useful and important. I b

17. Heart of Darkness . Joseph Conrad

18. Star Island . Carl Hiaasen
A romp like all his books.

19. Richistan: A journey through the American wealth boom and the lives of the new rich . Robert Frank

20. Razor Girl .  Carl Hiassen

21. Skinny Dip .  Carl Hiassen

22. Collected Fictions . Jorge Luis Borges
Same reader as LikeWar, which made me like LikeWar all the more.
Borges was a chief influence in my fiction writing.

23. James Madison: The Fourth President .  Garry Wills
Many insights about a president I knew little about.
 
24. Andrew Jackson .  Robert Remini

25. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less .  Barry Schwartz
Excellent book. Explains a lot of things we get frustrated with.

26. The Cold War Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace . Paul Thomas Chamberlin
An important book for all of us, but especially Baby Boomers who lived through much of this.

27. The Untold Story of the Talking Book .  Matthew Rubery

28. We Die Alone .  David Howarth
A compelling read from start to finish. Superb writing, made all the more powerful because it really happened.

29. The Year of Less [How I stopped shopping, gave away my belongings, and discovered life is worth more than anything you can buy in a store] . Cait Flanders

30. The Flight [Charles Lindbergh's daring and immortal 1927 transatlantic crossing] . Dan Hampton

31. Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics, Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher
This is a set of six lectures by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman

32. Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America . Walter Borneman
Another of the presidents I knew little about.

33. Dopesick [dealers, doctors, and the drug company that addicted America]
Some would call this unbalanced reporting as the author has an agenda. A lot of good research and insightful.

34. Never Trust a Liberal Over 3 - Especially a Republican . Ann Coulter
Same as #33.

35. LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media . P.W. Singer

* * * *

So many books, so little time.

My list of non-audio books is longer and shorter, many read for specific portions as research for other things. Some still in process. I found my re-reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil to be a thought provoking and rewarding read this year, prompted in part by Gordon Marino's The Existentialist's Survival Guide, subtitled How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age. 

An important idea set in motion this year was this one: In matters of virtue, one of the most needful virtues for our time is for courage.

Much more could be said, but that is always the case, is it not?  May your holiday season be rewarding and meaningful. Merry Christmas. And I'll catch you on the flip side. 

LikeWar, Sock Puppets and Fake News: Social Media as a Weapon of Disruption

This past week I started listening to another powerful, and frightening, audiobook called LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking.

I'm going to be writing about some of the particulars of this well-researched and well-documented volume, so this blog post is just a warm up. Here's from an Amazon review by Jon Foro:

Were you looking for more reasons to worry about the future, or the present? LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media will fuel your nightmares. P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking’s treatise travels well beyond the disinformation and fake news we’re all now familiar with (right?), addressing the ways the internet and our social networks will be deployed in actual war: recruiting terrorists, inflicting sabotage remotely on a vast scale, and even Matrix-grade reality manipulation.

Bottom line: Disruption is coming and we are not ready. Have you been following the Yellow Jackets situation in France? I find it pretty disconcerting, even scary. Have you ever been caught up in a mob where there is total chaos and violence? Who decides what is best for everyone?

In France, for example, the purpose of the fuel tax is to address Global Warming by penalizing driving. We see it all the time where taxes are used to help modify behavior. If government can't stop smokers, they can tax it heavily.

But the mob, I mean the People, do not want to deal with global warming in this fashion and are rioting, smashing things, flexing their muscles. Like children who get their way by throwing tantrums, what else will they demand that is not in their best interest?

That is an oversimplification, and the current situation is taking place in the now, so this book does not talk about it. Rather, it talks about the power of social media to destabilize, to breed hate, distrust, and stupidity.

The authors take readers on a deep dive into what was really happening during the last presidential election. The Soviet Union was indeed meddling here, but for different reasons than you might expect. The gullibility of extremists on all sides leads to re-Tweets so that incredible (Fake) stories gain traction by being passed along by legitimate "friends." For example, one story that got millions of shares was about the Pope endorsing Donald Trump. This originated in a Macedonian fake news farm where people were being paid to come up with as many outrageous stories per day as possible. Some catch a wave and others don't.

The amount of money devoted to Fake News (or Social Media warfare) in the Soviet Union was 40 million one year and 400 million the next. How much does the U.S. spend on propagation of its own news, fake news, spin doctoring?

Amazon reader/reviewer vickip007 writes:
LikeWar is the manual for warfare in the 21st century, a worthy successor to Singer's Ghost Fleet, and excellent debut work for Brooking. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who wants to seriously understand how war will be fought and social policy developed in the era of Facebook and Twitter.

There is a particularly urgent need for this book at a time when most tacticians have their eyes firmly fixed on enhancing cybersecurity through the protection of systems and hardware. While this is undeniably important, LikeWar reminds us that the information that is transmitted over that infrastructure is no less, and possibly quite a bit more important than the infrastructure itself. This message has never been more urgent than today when democratic nations struggle with balancing the need for an open civil society against the risks of foreign subversion and influence. This is the next great battle. It will be fought in the trenches of Facebook and the swamps of Twitter - wise commanders will bring LikeWar with them as field guide.

Amazon reader/review Michael Burnam-fink wrote:
Computer networks and smart phones connect billions of people, allowing ideas to flow faster than ever before in history. Sometimes, the results can be impressive. The Chiapas Zapatista movement in 1994 was a dial-up and fax version of a network insurgency that managed to bring enough international opprobrium on Mexico that the government blinked, and reached some kind of political accord (Chiapas is complicated). More recently, Eliot Higgins and a team of open source analysts at Bellingcat managed to track down the exact BUK missile system and Russian soldiers responsible for shooting down MH 17 in 2014.

But there are a lot of dark sides. When people connect, the emotion that spreads most rapidly is anger. Lies spread five times faster than truth. Musicians can use social networks to directly connect with their fans, and ISIS uses it to connect with alienated Muslim youths worldwide. Social networks sort diverse citizens into filter bubbles of people who think alike. Eliot Higgin's careful open source intelligence has a paranoid fun-house mirror version in the QAnon conspiracy, where Qultist decoders find hidden messages from an alleged 'senior white house source'...

The future is if anything, darker. Advances in machine learning and AI allow ever more realistic bots, computer generated DeepFakes where a politician can be programmed to say anything, and personalized targeting of people with exactly the propaganda they'll believe.


* * * *
One chapter goes into detail about Sock Puppet Accounts. Sock puppet accounts are nicknamed as such because they conceal the hand that moves the mouth. This Ed Gent article about sock puppets in New Scientist begins like this:
“Sock puppets” are the scourge of online discussion . Multiple accounts controlled by the same user can dominate comment forums and spread fake news. But now there’s a way to unmask the puppeteers.

The title of this naked security by Sophos article says it all: Twitter struggles to deal with the sock puppet and bot armies.

I agree with M Wilper's comments:
A rare book that offers key insights into the history unfolding in front of us. The authors synthesize the widespread manipulation of social media by various powers seeking to skew popular opinion in their favor. The story is very troubling, but I hope that this book and more like it will help us produce the antibodies we need to neutralize the danger.

* * * *
My only concern about the book is regarding how relevant it will be in five years.  I find it to be exceedingly important, however, especially at this current moment in time, for which reason I have asked for it as a Christmas present. I'm currently 2/3s of the way through and find the information exceedingly informative and accessible.

Related Links
The online threat that cybersecurity teams don’t cover
A military expert explains why social media is the new battlefield
The Machines That Will Fight the Social Media Wars of Tomorrow