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.


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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.

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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

What's All This Buzz About Yellow Jackets? Here's the Straight Dope from France.

May Day Protests 1971

This past month I made a decision to finally get around to writing about my experience as part of the May Day 1971 anti-war protest. To some extent it was traumatic due to all the violence I witnessed. In another sense it was uniquely my own, inasmuch as I approached it with my own unformed and uninformed personal perspectives, with also contributed to some of my inconclusive conclusions along with a few personal lessons that I've carried with me to this day.

One of these lessons is a total distrust as regards mob violence being something that "just happens." In DC 1971 there were organizers who spent 2 years orchestrating the main event that served to draw people to the Capitol for that weekend.

To this day I am suspicious when I hear that a mob has risen up in concert to protest this thing or that. Or that a "caravan" has organized itself spontaneously to "break in" to America.

Two weeks ago a friend from France who lives here in the States asked if I'd been following the news regarding the "Yellow Jackets." I had not. And if you're like I was two weeks ago, then you may wish to read a few links at the end of this article.

Basically, the past four weekends now tens of thousands of people have been putting on yellow vests and protesting. The gathering masses have become mobs who are burning cars, smashing windows, looting. If you are on Twitter you can do a search for >Yellow Jackets< and follow the story.

Photo by Randy Colas on Unsplash

To gain more insight on the Yellow Jacket uprising, I contacted Pedro H. Albuquerque, Associate Professor of Economics at the KEDGE Business School (Bordeaux and Marseille) and asked if he would provide more insight for American readers.

Pedro Albuquerque: So you saw all this mayhem about the Yellow Jackets, yep, quite impressive news. New phenomenon on that scale in a rich country. We had Tienanmen Square, Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street as precedents, but this scale is totally new.

EN: Is there a "leader" of the Yellow Jackets?

PA: NO and YES. If you are thinking in terms of traditional political leaders, according to the established laws and practices of the French Republic, the answer is NO. Many tried to appropriate this social movement and become their leaders, for example, extreme left, extreme right and conservative political leaders, union leaders, celebrities etc. but none had any success. It's a movement driven by irrational feelings of anger and hate against the "system" and against "globalization," with very little common ground and values otherwise. The carbon tax was just a convenient trigger. So no, they have no leaders. But still, YES, they have a leader, in the sense of new politics driven almost purely by social media, and his name is Mark Zuckerberg. We just do not know to which extent Zuckerberg is a willing or accidental leader. As in the recent case of Brexit, this is yet to be found out.

EN: Is it mob rule?

PA: Again, the answer is NO and YES. NO, because there's an endogenously arising order determined mostly by the usage rules of Facebook, and also by the usage rules of Twitter and YouTube to a lesser extent. And YES because once groups of people in this movement converge on the streets towards the forces of law enforcement, the result is almost inevitably mob rule.

EN: If the government can't cover the cost of necessities, what does the public intend to see as outcome?

PA: I don't think this is really a question of necessities, most of the Yellow Jackets, by the standards of poor and middle income countries, would be considered well-off. Studies show that most did not enjoy reductions or significant reductions in purchasing power, it is mostly about perceived realities than it is about economic realities. But their perceptions are real for two reasons: compared to other regions of Europe, people living in rural or far suburban areas of European metropolitan centers know that their incomes have been progressing much less fast than those of people living in cities, and they also know that their infrastructure of services does not see the same advancements which can be seen in urban centers, and in some cases they have even seen the collapse of public services. They also get the feeling that some global industries, like tech, finance and upscale services like movies, have accumulated most of the wealth creation of the last 30 years. This has created an enormous anger towards government and sometimes also towards rich, highly educated, or foreign people living in advanced countries, meaning, anger towards any group that succeeded or have benefited from the social and technological developments of the last 30 years.

I do not think that the government will have any problem offering the Yellow Jackets financial and political "gifts" as it promised, After all,  some have estimated that active participants in this movement represent only 0.8% of the population. The real problem is that the socially destructive and politically chaotic dynamics created by social media platforms, as seen during the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum in the UK, the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and now the Yellow Jackets in France, are going to become only more disruptive and more pervasive around the world. We should expect then to see the same happening in any other country, at any moment, triggers and timing depending mostly on the decisions made by the top management of social media megacorporations. Only time will tell if, as a result, democracies will fall or will learn and adapt by curbing the power and socially destructive effects of social media megacorporations on society.

EN: Thank you for this perspective on recent events in France. 

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Related Links
BuzzFeed's In Depth Overview
Yellow Jackets on the Twitterfeed
Ramifications of the Riots