# data[].attributes.headline
The 2020 Election Will Be a War of Disinformation - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.subject
The 2020 Election Will Be a War of Disinformation - The Atlantic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election

Illustration: Mishko; Hanna Alandi / Getty

Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.
One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked "Like" on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook's algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like "In Trump We Trust." I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.
To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.
The president's reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans' understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president's conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video-served up by the Trump campaign-that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: "That's right, the whistleblower's own lawyer said, 'The coup has started ...' " Swipe. "Democrats are doing Putin's bidding ..." Swipe. "The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing ..." Swipe. "Only one man can stop this chaos ..." Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I'd assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn't that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself-about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else-felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes-jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world's demagogues and strongmen in power.
Read: What, exactly, were Russians trying to do with those Facebook ads?
Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year's contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view-one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

THE DEATH STAR

The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected-with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower- his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as "the Death Star."

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump's 2016 campaign, Parscale didn't become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office-and his efforts will shape this year's election.

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple "farm boy from Kansas" (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an "Ivy League" school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds-claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his "last $500" (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice-including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. "I just made up a price," he later told The Washington Post. "I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything." The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.

Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures-a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale-a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience-was running the Republican front-runner's digital operation from his personal laptop.

Parscale slid comfortably into Trump's orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious-with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives-but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate's. "Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of," says a former colleague from the campaign.

Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending-none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump's inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.
Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it
The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale's most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising-amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton's criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism-Parscale's team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. "He was a get-shit-done type of person," says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. "He was probably better at managing up," Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump's digital ignorance to flatter him. "Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn't need to listen to the polls, because he'd crunched his data and they were going to win by six points," one former campaign staffer told me. "I was like, 'Come on, man, don't bullshit a bullshitter.' " But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)

David A. Graham: The real problem with fake news
James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale's political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform's new tools. "Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist who'd been around the block a few times might say, 'Oh, that will never work,' Brad's predisposition was to say, 'Yeah, let's try it.' " From June to November, Trump's campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton's ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump " got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser."

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump's surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a "genius" and the campaign's "secret weapon," and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president's 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.
Read: What Facebook did to American democracy
Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. "When I give a speech, I tell it like a story," he said. "My story is my story."

DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls "P." In college, P had studied the "Little Albert experiment," in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough-about 100,000 members-he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. ( Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P's experiment was one plank in a larger "disinformation architecture"-which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers-that experts say aided Duterte's rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to "an invisible radiation" that takes effect while "the population doesn't even feel it is being acted upon.") But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.
Read: Peter Pomerantsev on Russia and the menace of unreality
In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology- muddy the waters; alternative facts -but they're building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign's use of micro-targeting-the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn't invent this practice-Barack Obama's campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton's followed suit. But Trump's effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump's team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, "Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators." An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of " three major voter suppression operations underway." (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources-without users' consent-Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed "psychographic profiles" for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: "Did you feel like you had to say that?"

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that "with the right kind of nudges," people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. "Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that," Wylie said. "We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States."

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual "honey traps" on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its "psychographic" targeting really had. But Wylie-who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster-said the firm's work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

"What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?" he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year's election. "There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do ... and make it much more sophisticated." These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn't be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launched-and publicly accessible- "library" where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency.

Read: The age of reverse censorship
The campaign doesn't run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations-adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the "Donate" buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they're most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful-and Trump's advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of "illegal aliens"- a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use -and the corruption of the "swamp."

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters' phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new "peer to peer" texting apps-including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser- a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking "Send" one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren't required to disclose who's behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump's reelection strategy. The medium's ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign's texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas ("They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let's CRUSH our End of Month Goal"). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear-and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee's Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates' conservative credentials. The texts-written in a conversational style, as if they'd been sent from a friend-were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

WAR ON THE PRESS

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president's son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter's credibility.

I wasn't sure what to make of this gloating-people in Trump's circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger's "history of intense Trump hatred." The story was based on a series of Instagram posts-all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider -in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a "raging lib." Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were "not appropriate." Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, "was bizarre and unsettling."

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. ( The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it's been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years' worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair-or politically damaging-to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president's eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up-a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views-Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)

Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting-but the effort has yielded fruit.

In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they're planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. "This is innovative shit," said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. "They're appropriating call-out culture."

What's notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complaining-with some merit-about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today's most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. "Journalistic integrity is dead," Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. "There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information."

It's a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content-no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump's assault on the press, and the more "enemies of the people" his allies can take out along the way, the better. " A culture war is a war," Steve Bannon told the Times last year. "There are casualties in war."

This attitude has permeated the president's base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media-while 91 percent turn to the president for "accurate information." This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. "Remember," he told a crowd in 2018, " what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year's election. Nor is that his goal. "It's our job to sell our narrative louder than the media," Lanza said. "They're clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we're never going to be in concert. So the war continues."

From December 2019: The dark psychology of social networks
Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train "swarms of surrogates" to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. "We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers," Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. "So we're not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day."

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you'll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas-which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm-instead of paying the sites directly-candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don't fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS

Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky's gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had "just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots" in Louisville.

There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he'd misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim.

The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting "irregularities." When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.)

The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourse- posing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: "I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.")

But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentucky's election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in America -a sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.

Of course, dirty tricks aren't new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.

Mishko

Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created "sock puppet" accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. "It's almost as if there's a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West," he said.

Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, "I don't think [they] work." He may be right-it's unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.

According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump's reelection prospects. Regardless of where they're coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.

Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a "hall of mirrors." He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an O'Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton.

Flaherty said he didn't know who was behind the efforts targeting O'Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. "But you can't watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someone's fucking with something," he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden's campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidate's legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary-opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War-and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

As the president's reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama's special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two "false flag" operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate's account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed "Dry Alabama," was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he unaware of the Russian bot effortand does not support the use of misinformation.)

When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. "If you don't do it, you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back," Osborne said. "You have a moral imperative to do this-to do whatever it takes."

Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. "It's just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters," Flaherty told me. "I know there's this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they're like, 'Lie!' " Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. "I don't think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump," Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. "They can stick to things that are true."

One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the president's campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowan's plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creative-and controversial-measures in mind.

For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning "hometown news" stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that they're paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.

When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the "super-predator" ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were "fair game" because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to vote -a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was joking-but said she would pursue any strategy that was "in the bounds of the law."

"We are in a radically disruptive moment right now," McGowan told me. "We have a president that lies every day, unabashedly ... I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him."

This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and "deepfakes" (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their party's values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge.
From May 2018: The era of fake video begins
Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last year's presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake news-an approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S.

Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. "It's not going to solve the whole problem," he told me, "but it's going to help with volume."

There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

Once you internalize the possibility that you're being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you're too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.

POWERS OF INCUMBENCY

If there's one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, it's that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facility-but Parscale put an end to the practice: He didn't want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they weren't supposed to see.

Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicans-inside the organization or out-hesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism.

Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "He knows he has the confidence of the family," one former colleague told me, "which gives him more swagger." When the U.K.'s Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscale's spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. "The president is an excellent businessman," he told the tabloid, "and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family."

But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscale's standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trump's attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.)

Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale's digital expertise, he doesn't have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trump's message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? "People start to ask the question-you're building this apparatus, and that's great, but what's the overarching narrative?" said a former campaign staffer.

But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn't have in 2016-the powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he's willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming "invasion" and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members.

Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safe-but within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the "crisis" having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line?
Read: McKay Coppins on the conservatives trying to ditch fake news
It doesn't require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what they're injecting into the bloodstream.

After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC.

The votes haven't even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

NOTHING IS TRUE

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal-the one in which Joe Biden is the villain-and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to "give illegal aliens the right to vote." At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that "the governor of Virginia executed a baby"-prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, "Murderer!"

This incendiary fabrication didn't seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case-that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally "executed a baby."

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor's abortion comments to back up Trump's smear.

Related Stories

After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal- if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president's accomplishments, she didn't care if he "fabricates a little bit." A man responded to my questions about Trump's dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media "ought to try telling the truth once in a while." Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. "He tells you what you want to hear," Willnow said. "And I don't know if it's true or not-but it sounds good, so fuck it."

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers "a mixture of gullibility and cynicism." When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they'd known all along-and would then "admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness." Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to "believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true."
This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline "The 2020 Disinformation War."
Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election's legacy will be clear-not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020. One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked "Like" on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign.

# data[].attributes.headline
How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy - Vox

# data[].attributes.subject
How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy - Vox

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On Wednesday, the Senate voted to acquit President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

Despite all the incontrovertible facts at the center of this story, it was always inevitable that this process would change very few minds. No matter how clear a case the Democrats made, it was always highly likely that no single version of the truth was ever going to be accepted.

This fact underscores a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship - some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side.

But there's another, equally vexing problem. We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, "people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact." This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president's impeachment did very little to move public opinion.

The core challenge we're facing today is information saturation and a hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process.

One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out. After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances.There's Team Liberal and Team Conservative, and pretty much everyone knows which side they're on. So you stick to the places that feed you the information you most want to hear.

My Vox colleague Dave Roberts calls this an "epistemic crisis." The foundation for shared truth, he argues, has collapsed. I don't disagree with that, but I'd frame the problem a little differently.

We're in an age of manufactured nihilism.

The issue for many people isn't exactly a denial of truth as such. It's more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

I call this "manufactured" because it's the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. "The Democrats don't matter," Bannon reportedly said in 2018. "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."

This idea isn't new, but Bannon articulated it about as well as anyone can. The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media's ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.

What we're facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn't really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn't achievable.

Bannon's political objective is clear. As he explained in a 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference talk, he sees Trump as a stick of dynamite with which to blow up the status quo. So "flooding the zone" is a means to that end. But more generally, creating widespread cynicism about the truth and the institutions charged with unearthing it erodes the very foundation of liberal democracy. Andthe strategy is working.

What flooding the zone actually means

For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.

And it produces a certainnihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search. The fact that 60 percent of Americans say they encounter conflicting reports about the same event is an example of what I mean. In the face of such confusion, it's not surprising that less than half the country trusts what they read in the press.

Bannon articulated the zone-flooding philosophy well, but he did not invent it. In our time, it was pioneered by Vladimir Putin in post-Soviet Russia. Putin uses the media to engineer a fog of disinformation, producing just enough distrust to ensure that the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative.

In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin's propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn't to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that "the truth is unknowable" and that the only sensible choice is "to follow a strong leader."

One major reason for the strategy's success, both in the US and Russia, is that it coincided with a moment when the technological and political conditions were in place for it to thrive. Media fragmentation, the explosion of the internet, political polarization, curated timelines, and echo chambers - all of this allows a "flood the zone with shit" strategy to work.

The role of "gatekeeping" institutions has also changed significantly. Before the internet and social media, most people got their news from a handful of newspapers and TV networks. These institutions functioned like referees, calling out lies, fact-checking claims, and so on. And they had the ability to control the flow of information and set the terms of the conversation.

Today, gatekeepers still matter in terms of setting a baseline for political knowledge, but there's much more competition for clicks and audiences, and that alters the incentives for what's declared newsworthy in the first place. At the same time, traditional media outlets remain committed to a set of norms that are ill adapted to the modern environment. The preference for objectivity in political coverage, in particular, is a problem.

As Joshua Green, who wrote a biography of Bannon, explained, Bannon's lesson from the Clinton impeachment in the 1990s was that to shape the narrative, a story had to move beyond the right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media. That's exactly what happened with the now-debunked Uranium One story that dogged Clinton from the beginning of her campaign - a story Bannon fed to the Times, knowing that the supposedly liberal paper would run with it because that's what mainstream media news organizations do.

In this case, Bannon flooded the zone with a ridiculous story not necessarily to persuade the public that it was true (although surely plenty of people bought into it) but to create a cloud of corruption around Clinton. And the mainstream press, merely by reporting a story the way it always has, helped create that cloud.

You see this dynamic at work daily on cable news. Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway lies. She lies a lot. Yet CNN and MSNBC have shown zero hesitation in giving her a platform to lie because they see their job as giving government officials - even ones who lie - a platform.

Even if CNN or MSNBC debunk Conway's lies, the damage will be done. Fox and right-wing media will amplify her and other falsehoods; armies on social media, bot and real, will, too (@realDonaldTrump will no doubt chime in). The mainstream press will be a step behind in debunking - and even the act of debunking will serve to amplify the lies.

UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff calls this the "framing effect." As Lakoff puts it, if you say "don't think of an elephant," you can't help but think of an elephant. In other words, even if you reject an argument, merely repeating it cements the frame in people's minds. Debunking it is still useful, of course, but there's a cost to dignifying it in the first place.

There is some research that points to the utility of fact-checking. Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have shown that repeated exposure to fact-checking does tend to increase the accuracy of beliefs. But the issue with zone-flooding is an overabundance of news, which diminishes the importance of any individual story, no matter how big or damning.

In this environment, there are often too many things happening at once; it's a constant game of whack-a-mole for journalists. And we know that false claims, if they're repeated enough, become more plausible the more often they're shared, something psychologists have called the "illusory truth" effect. Our brains, it turns out, tend to associate repetition with truthfulness. Some interesting new research, moreover, found that the more people encounter information the more likely they are to feel justified in spreading it, whether it's true or not.

Flooding the zone, polarization, and why many people still don't know what Trump did

This all intersects with political polarization in troubling ways. One consequence of pervasive confusion about what's happening is that people feel more comfortable siding with their political tribe. If everything's up for grabs, and it's hard to sift through the competing narratives to find the truth, then there's nothing left but culture war politics. There's "us" and "them," and the possibility of persuasion is off the table.

It's worth noting that this polarization is asymmetric. The left overwhelmingly receives its news from organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or cable news networks like MSNBC or CNN. Some of the reporting is surely biased, and probably biased in favor of liberals, but it's still (mostly) anchored to basic journalistic ethics.

As a recent book by three Harvard researchers explains, this just isn't true of the right. American conservative media functions like a closed system, with Fox News at the center. Right-wing outlets are less tethered to conventional journalistic ethics and exist mostly to propagate the bullshit they produce.

All this has created an atmosphere that has helped Trump. The Trump administration was remarkably successful at muddying the waters on Ukraine and impeachment, and Republicans in Congress helped by parroting the administration's talking points.

The fact is, Trump did what Democrats have accused him of doing. We know, with absolute certainty, that the president tried to get a foreign government to investigate a family member of one of his political rivals. And we know this because of the witnesses who testified before the House Intelligence Committee and because Trump's own White House released a record of the call proving it.

Yet all the polling data we have suggests that public opinion on Trump and Ukraine basically held steady. Again, some of this is pure partisan recalcitrance. But there's good reason to believe that the right's muddying of the waters - making the story about Ukraine and Hunter Biden, pushing out conspiracy theories, repeatedly trumpeting Trump's own version of events, etc. - played a role.

The issue is that the coverage of the trials, in both the mainstream press and right-wing outlets, ensured that these counternarratives are part of the public conversation. It added to the general atmosphere of doubt and confusion. And that's why zone flooding presents a near-insoluble problem for the press.

The old model is broken

The way impeachment played out underscores just how the new media ecosystem is a problem for our democracy.

It helps to think of zone-flooding less as a strategy deployed by a person or group and more as a natural consequence of the way media works.

We don't need a master puppeteer pulling the media's strings. The race for content, the need for clicks, is more than enough. Bannon or Conway can shake things up by feeding nonsense into the system.

Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories.This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

The instinct of the mainstream press has always been to conquer lies by exposing them. But it's just not that simple anymore (if it ever was). There are too many claims to debunk and too many conflicting narratives. And the decision to cover something is a decision to amplify it and, in some cases, normalize it.

We probably need a paradigm shift in how the press covers politics. Nearly all of the incentives driving media militate against this kind of rethinking, however. And so we're likely stuck with this problem for a very long time.

As is often the case, the diagnosis is much easier than the cure. But liberal democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Flood the zone with shit": How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On Wednesday, the Senate voted to acquit President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice. Despite all the incontrovertible facts at the center of this story, it was always inevitable that this process would change very few minds.

# data[].attributes.headline
The 9/11 Decade | The Image War | Al Jazeera World - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
The 9/11 Decade | The Image War | Al Jazeera World - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 9/11 Decade | The Image War | Al Jazeera World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Manipulation is as old as politics, but today's politicians-as well as companies, NGOs, activists, and criminals-have more techniques than ever for shaping public opinion. This obsession tracks those techniques, from the old-fashioned use and abuse of language to the deployment of bots, online crowds, and personalized targeting on social media-as well as the latest scientific research on persuasion, belief, and how information and ideas are spread.

# data[].attributes.headline
Semiotics analysis for beginners! | How to read signs in film | Roland Barthes Media Theory - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Semiotics analysis for beginners! | How to read signs in film | Roland Barthes Media Theory - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Semiotics analysis for beginners! | How to read signs in film | Roland Barthes Media Theory

# data[].attributes.headline
Marshall McLuhan - Digital Prophecies: The Medium is the Message - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Marshall McLuhan - Digital Prophecies: The Medium is the Message - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Marshall McLuhan - Digital Prophecies: The Medium is the Message

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many countries have laws that prohibit more overt astroturfing practices. In the United States the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may send cease-and-desist orders or require a fine of $16,000 per day for those that violate its "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising".

# data[].attributes.headline
Propaganda bots make it look like something has 'grassroots' support

# data[].attributes.subject
Propaganda bots make it look like something has 'grassroots' support

# data[].attributes.headline
A guide to 21st-century propaganda: echo chambers, fake news, bots, big data, and the science of persuasion — Quartz

# data[].attributes.subject
A guide to 21st-century propaganda: echo chambers, fake news, bots, big data, and the science of persuasion — Quartz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"There are two kinds of propaganda," wrote Aldous Huxley in 1958 in Brave New World Revisited, a retrospective on his famous novel:

rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed...

(in other words, arguments couched in facts and logic)

...and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion.

This latter kind, Huxley went on

avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords...

Make America Great Again!

...by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats...

Lock her up! Lock her up!

...and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.

To Huxley's readers, most of whom had lived through the era of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, these methods would all have been familiar. But over time it came to seem, at least in the West, as if his "rational propaganda"-still possibly misleading, but nonetheless rooted in the language of reason and fact and enlightened self-interest-had won out as the primary form of political discourse.

And then 2016 happened. Voters chose Brexit and Donald Trump even though it was patently clear that Brexit hadn't been thought through and that Trump wasn't fit to be president. "Expert," a term for someone who specializes in facts, became a pejorative. Politicians lied with seeming impunity, no matter how blatantly and how often the press caught them doing it.

So what went wrong?

The naïve pursuit of reason

The standard answer is that many things had gone wrong. The global financial crisis. Jobs lost to globalization and automation. Widening inequality. Terrorist attacks. Refugees. And complacent, technocratic elites who spoke self-assuredly of growth and progress while failing to notice how many people saw little of either. That, goes the story, opened the way for unscrupulous populists to appeal to voters' base emotions, making them ignore facts and logic that would normally be obvious to anyone.

But this narrative, while not untrue, contains a weakness. It's the assumption that being able to appeal to voters' base emotion is an anomaly, something that happens only at times of great national stress, and that under "normal" circumstances (whatever those are), facts and reason can and do prevail.

In reality, maybe what's anomalous is for facts and reason to have the upper hand.

The belief, or rather hope, that humankind is ultimately rational has gripped Western politics at least since Descartes, and inspired such 19th-century optimists as Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill. "Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe," Jefferson famously wrote.

But in recent years we've learned much about the human mind that contradicts the view of people as rationally self-interested decision-makers. Psychologists have established that we form beliefs first and only then look for evidence to back them up. Research has turned up apparent physiological and psychological differences between liberals and conservatives, and found evidence that these differences have ancient evolutionary origins. It has identified the " backfire effect," a.k.a. confirmation bias, in which people hew to even more strongly to an existing belief when shown evidence that clearly contradicts it. (What, one wonders, would being shown the internet have done to Jefferson's faith in a free press-killed it, or made it stronger?)

Other research has looked at the habits of highly effective propagandists such as China, Russia, and alt-right icon Milo Yiannopoulos. The main takeaways: truth, rationality, consistency, and likability aren't necessary for getting people to absorb your viewpoint. Things that do work: incessant repetition, distractions from the main issue, sidestepping counterarguments rather than refuting them, using "peripheral cues" to establish credibility or authority, and antagonizing people who dislike you in order to get the attention of people who might like you. Another favorite technique, this one perfected by the tobacco industry: strategically sowing doubt in something for which there's overwhelming evidence.

Somehow, these methods must be playing into our heuristics- ancient cognitive shortcuts humans or our ancestors evolved as survival instincts, probably long before we had language and reason.

They're also a perfect summary of the Trump playbook.

The left-and the left-leaning mainstream media-failed to grasp this, argues George Lakoff, a Berkeley cognitive linguist. They kept trying to refute right-wing populists' arguments, check their facts, and point out inconsistencies in their positions. That is why leftists were caught unawares by Brexit and Trump's victory and still flounder in dealing with him.

Lakoff, who is best known for his work on how the metaphors we use influence our beliefs, argues that people tend to vote in line with their values, not rational beliefs. And he has advanced an interesting claim: that rightists are inherently better than leftists at appealing to people's values, because of what, according to him, they tend to study at college:

If you're a conservative going into politics, there's a good chance you'll study cognitive science, that is, how people really think and how to market things by advertising. So they know people think using frames and metaphors and narratives and images and emotions and so on... Now, if instead you are a progressive...you'll study political science, law, public policy, economic theory and so on...

What you'll learn in those courses is what is called Enlightenment reason, from 1650, from Descartes. And here's what that reasoning says:... [I]f we think logically and we all have the same reasoning, if you just tell people the facts, they should reason to the same correct conclusion. And that just isn't true. And that keeps not being true, and liberals keep making the same mistake year after year after year.

The 21st century: propaganda on steroids

The dictators of the early 20th century knew all about repetition, distraction, antagonism, and so on, even if they didn't know the science behind them. That's why, as we saw at the start, Huxley's description of non-rational propaganda so neatly matches Trump's verbal tics. As the historian Timothy Snyder observes in his recent book On Tyranny, Trump's methods for undermining truth are very similar to those identified by Victor Klemperer, a scholar and diarist who lived through Hitler's Germany and the Soviet aftermath.

What's changed since then is, of course, the internet, and the many new ways it creates for falsehoods to reach us. The power of populism today lies in its ability to combine 20th-century propaganda techniques with 21st-century technology, putting propaganda on steroids.

Here are the main ways that happens:

Echo chambers. Social media and the explosion of choice in news sources has exacerbated our tendency to clump into like-minded groups. We see far more messages that reinforce our beliefs than challenge them. That's because the platforms through which we find most of what we see online-social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo and search engines such as Google, Yandex, and Baidu-have business models that require them to maximize the time we spend on them.

Alternative news sources. Whether it's Breitbart for the alt-right or RT for the Kremlin, it's now possible to create large, well-financed operations that pump out news with a strong agenda and can reach people across the world. (Russian TV is particularly good at appealing to heuristic thinking, argues Maxim Alyukov, a Russian sociologist.) In fact, just one person can become an alternative news source-look at Trump's Twitter account. This proliferation of sources doesn't just have the effect of overloading people with competing versions of the truth. They can also change the news cycle, determining what gets attention and what doesn't, forcing other media to chase stories they might otherwise ignore and neglect those they should be paying attention to.

Fake news. Even the most tendentious news sources tend to stop shy of outright falsehood, but some-such as those notorious Macedonian teenagers who spread made-up pro-Trump stories during the US election campaign-deal in nothing else. Whereas sites like Breitbart and RT have a political agenda, these are essentially commercial parasites on politics, creating low-cost, sensational content to draw clicks and make money off ads. But by adding to the distraction and confusion, they contribute to further undermining the consensus on truth.

Online swarms. If you have a fiercely loyal base of supporters (Trump, Yiannopolous) or can pay them (Russia, China) you can mobilize vast groups of people to troll opponents and flood the digital airwaves with your desired message, amplifying it and making it hard to tell how much support it really has.

Bots. Automated social media accounts are also being pressed into service to both amplify messages and quash them. As technology improves they'll become ever harder to distinguish from real people.

Psychological profiling and targeted advertising. In its by-now infamous "emotional contagion" study of 2014, Facebook showed that it's possible to influence people's moods in precise, predictable ways by putting certain words into the posts they see on Facebook. In an only slightly less controversial study the company showed that it could change people's likelihood of voting. Companies such as Cambridge Analytica claim to be able to sway voters' preferences en masse, using publicly available data skimmed from people's social-media accounts to build detailed psychological profiles and crafted messages for each person. "Weaponized AI propaganda," as Scout.ai calls it.

We're launching a new Quartz obsession with propaganda to follow how the combination of these technologies with old-fashioned spin and demagoguery are changing politics and public discourse.

Huxley, it must be said, foresaw none of this. He devoted much of Brave New World Revisited to assessing which of the futuristic methods of persuasion in Brave New World, written 26 years earlier, might be on the way to coming true. He wrote chapters on "brainwashing," "chemical persuasion," "subconscious persuasion," and even mass hypnosis-prophecies that now seem somewhat quaint.

Yet one, almost throwaway paragraph about the world of the 1950s rings stunningly true 60 years later (emphasis mine):

In regard to propaganda the early advocates [like Jefferson] of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies-the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

The central point of Brave New World was that-contrary to what George Orwell would suggest 16 years later with 1984- governments didn't need to be totalitarian to exercise social control. Our "almost infinite appetite for distractions" could render a population politically helpless. Of all Huxley's warnings, that was the most prescient.

Most Popular

Read full story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
21st-century propaganda: A guide to interpreting and confronting the dark arts of persuasion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"There are two kinds of propaganda," wrote Aldous Huxley in 1958 in Brave New World Revisited, a retrospective on his famous novel: rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed...

# data[].attributes.headline
Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

# data[].attributes.subject
Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Propaganda plays on human emotions-fear, hope, anger, frustration, sympathy-to direct audiences toward the desired goal. In the deepest sense, propaganda is a mind game - the skillful propagandist exploits people's fears and prejudices. Successful propagandists understand how to psychologically tailor messages to people's emotions in order to create a sense of excitement and arousal that suppresses critical thinking.

# data[].attributes.headline
Can we still teach about media bias in the post-truth age? | David Buckingham

# data[].attributes.subject
Can we still teach about media bias in the post-truth age? | David Buckingham

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the wake of the Brexit referendum campaign, the victory of Donald Trump, and the attacks on the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, many have argued that we are entering a 'post-truth' era. In this context, is bias still a useful and meaningful concept in media literacy education? And if so, how should we teach it?
Two weeks ago, the BBC Trust - the body that regulates the UK's national public service broadcaster - ruled that its chief political correspondent, Laura Kuenssberg, had breached impartiality and accuracy guidelines in her reporting of a story involving the British Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Given that the Trust is not exactly the most ferocious of media regulators, the ruling might have been rather surprising; although in light of Kuenssberg's persistent misrepresentations of Corbyn's views, it was by no means undeserved.

In my previous post, I wrote about the phenomenon of 'fake news', which has continued to gather headlines. On Monday, an official UK parliamentary enquiry was announced on the topic. Yet, as I argued, the focus on fake news rather leaves aside the question of 'non-fake' news - the news reporting provided by professional journalists. Clearly, it is not going to be possible - even for Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page - to eradicate 'fake news'; but even if it were, it would be a mistake to believe that this would lead to a new era of reliable, trustworthy news reporting. Indeed, in some respects, the phenomenon of 'fake news' and claims about 'alternative facts' places an even greater responsibility on professional journalists.

Famously, 'post-truth' was the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year for 2016. The editors defined it as 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief'. As this implies, the term post-truth represents a critical, even sarcastic, claim about the world, rather than a celebratory one. It describes a situation in which politicians in particular have not only made false promises or tried to manipulate public debate, but actually told outright lies, and managed to do so with impunity. While this is most apparent with Trump - as in his claims about climate change or voter fraud, or about Obama's place of birth - there have been similar instances in the Brexit campaign, and in the challenges to Corbyn's leadership.

One leading UK figure in this respect - and one of the first British politicians to meet with Trump after his election - is the former Education and Justice Secretary, Michael Gove. Gove was party to the false claim made during the Brexit campaign that Britain was paying £350 million a week to the EU, and that after Brexit this money would be diverted into the National Health Service. When challenged by leading economists, Gove claimed that 'people in this country have had enough of experts' - as though established sources of knowledge carried no weight against the superior wisdom of 'the people'.

It may not come as a surprise to readers of this blog if I admit that I voted for Jeremy Corbyn, and that I remain a (somewhat ambivalent) supporter. Yet in claiming that Corbyn has been subject to a campaign of biased media coverage from the outset - not just in the right-wing press, but also in more 'liberal' news outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC - I am not simply giving voice to my own bias. The BBC Trust ruling confirms what several people have been arguing for some time about the BBC's coverage, and specifically about Laura Kuenssberg.

About six months ago, the London School of Economics published a detailed research report that substantiated such claims, at least as regards the newspapers. Of course, there are bound to be questions raised about such research. The researchers used content analysis to calculate the proportions of positive and negative stories. Yet what counts as positive or negative obviously depends upon the reader's existing views; and enumerating negative comments does not in itself tell us anything about their overall meaning, let alone their effects.

Counting instances of bias is also much easier in situations where there is a straightforward binary choice - are we for or against Corbyn, or Brexit? - but it is obviously much harder when it comes to more complex issues. Even such seemingly simple choices play out against a background of wider social and political issues: so how we understand Corbyn's line on nuclear missiles, for example, calls into question how we understand Britain's place and status in the world.

Even so, it is impossible to deny that newspapers like the Sun, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail have systematically ridiculed and vilified Corbyn. In some instances, this has involved manipulation and misrepresentation of a kind that definitely amounts to 'fake news': the story about Corbyn apparently 'dancing a jig' while on his way to a memorial service at the Cenotaph in London comes to mind. 'Quality' newspapers like the Telegraph or the Times may be less crude and blatant in their approach; but apparently neutral, factual reports in such papers are often designed to press particular readers' buttons.

As the media academic Robert Entman has argued, bias is 'a curiously undertheorized staple of public discourse about the media'. Like 'stereotype', it is a commonsense concept that frequently recurs in everyday discussion. We might wish to replace it with something more academically 'theorized', or at least more precise; while some might argue that it is simply old-fashioned and irrelevant in a 'post-truth' era. Yet the idea is unlikely to disappear. Accusations of bias remain a persistent charge in debates about news media, and they have recurred throughout the debate about 'fake news'. Ultimately, bias remains a useful umbrella term, although it is one that teachers and students need to work with and interrogate.

So what might we teach about media bias? Firstly, like other key concepts in media theory, we need to question and problematise the idea. Alongside bias, there is a cluster of terms that are frequently used interchangeably, such as objectivity, impartiality, fairness and balance. Yet while these terms may overlap, they do not mean exactly the same thing. Carefully separating these out, and looking at instances of each, would seem to be a necessary first step. There are several taxonomies of types of media bias that might be useful here - although again, they need to be used carefully and critically.

At the same time, we need to recognize the inevitability of bias. What we perceive as bias in the first place obviously depends upon our own biases - our own prejudices, assumptions or preconceptions. In the age of the 'filter bubble', there is a risk that this is becoming easier to ignore. We are increasingly able to select and customise our media environment in ways that are likely to confirm those biases. Encouraging students to reflect on their own media practices in this respect, and the sources of their own information and judgments, would help to illuminate the complexities at stake.

Secondly, we need to refine the idea of bias in order to apply it to a wider range of situations. Bias may be evident not just in overt commentary, but also (and perhaps more powerfully) in what a given report chooses to focus on and to ignore. It may be apparent in the connections that are made (explicitly or implicitly) across news stories, and in how key topics are defined in the first place. There is bound to be bias in how the news agenda is set - in what is seen to count as news in the first place - and in how particular topics are framed or defined - that is, what is included or excluded from consideration, or what is seen to be relevant or irrelevant. These two ideas - agenda-setting and - have generated considerable amounts of research. One could well argue that these less overt forms of bias are actually more influential, because they are harder for readers to notice, and hence to resist.

Thirdly, there is the issue of how we understand the institutional causes of bias. In some instances, bias may be a result of the direct interference of media owners or proprietors - most notoriously, of course, Rupert Murdoch. Yet this kind of institutional bias is often less direct: it is about the 'culture' of a news organisation, and how its staff are encouraged to behave. It may also reflect what the owners and the employees believe about the relationship between the institution and its audience. Journalists often argue that the bias of their own reporting simply reflects that of their readers. In this sense, there can be an economic motivation for bias: people will not pay to consume things that conflict with their own biases. Bias sells.

Institutional connections across and between media are also important here. Bias in one medium may well be reinforced by other media: even if specific positions vary, the overall agenda that is set is frequently shared, as news organizations compete with each other. However, it is important to beware of a monolithic view of media - epitomized by the blanket term 'mainstream media' (MSM). This term is becoming increasingly fashionable, not only on the political left (among supporters of Corbyn, for example), but also on the right: Donald Trump's strategist Steve Bannon has apparently referred to the 'mainstream media' as the new administration's 'opposition party'.

This idea seems to rest on a very old-fashioned, conspiratorial account of the media simply brainwashing the masses. It assumes that 'The Media' are all the same; and it also implies that something preferable (the truth, perhaps) is only to be found outside the mainstream. Some on the Left - including some of Jeremy Corbyn's media strategists - look to social media as a more effective vehicle for progressive ideas, ignoring the fact that the political Right (and not least Trump) have used such media with considerable success. Meanwhile, there's a new irony as some are now looking to the same mainstream media to correct the excesses (fake news, hate speech) of social media.

I believe we can and should still teach about media bias. The changing political and media context - the so-called 'post-truth' age - makes this more complex and problematic, but it also makes it more necessary. However, it is important to avoid simply blaming the media, or overestimating their power. Aside from anything else, this can lead to a situation where the mediation of politics comes to be seen as more important than politics itself. In the process, the apparent lack of media appeal of particular politicians (such as Corbyn) is seen to define their electability - as if getting the packaging and presentation right is the fundamental issue. Ultimately, such arguments reinforce a generalized distrust and cynicism that is increasingly shared across the political spectrum. It's not something I would regard as a good outcome for media literacy education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Can we still teach about media bias in the post-truth age?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the wake of the Brexit referendum campaign, the victory of Donald Trump, and the attacks on the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, many have argued that we are entering a 'post-truth' era. In this context, is bias still a useful and meaningful concept in media literacy education?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lying and deception can be the basis of many propaganda techniques including Ad Homimen arguments, Big-Lie, Defamation, Door-in-the-Face, Half-truth, Name-calling or any other technique that is based on dishonesty or deception. For example, many politicians have been found to frequently stretch or break the truth.

# data[].attributes.headline
Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

# data[].attributes.subject
Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Propaganda plays on human emotions-fear, hope, anger, frustration, sympathy-to direct audiences toward the desired goal. In the deepest sense, propaganda is a mind game - the skillful propagandist exploits people's fears and prejudices. Successful propagandists understand how to psychologically tailor messages to people's emotions in order to create a sense of excitement and arousal that suppresses critical thinking.

# data[].attributes.headline
(17) 7 Propaganda Techniques Used on You Every Day - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
(17) 7 Propaganda Techniques Used on You Every Day - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know - HowStuffWorks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Propaganda Techniques Used on You Every Day

# data[].attributes.headline
(17) Introduction to Propaganda - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
(17) Introduction to Propaganda - YouTube

# data[].attributes.headline
(19) The difference between classical and operant conditioning - Peggy Andover - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
(19) The difference between classical and operant conditioning - Peggy Andover - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The difference between classical and operant conditioning - Peggy Andover

# data[].attributes.headline
(27) Lessons in Propaganda: Slavko Martinov at TEDxChristchurch - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
(27) Lessons in Propaganda: Slavko Martinov at TEDxChristchurch - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lessons in Propaganda: Slavko Martinov at TEDxChristchurch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2003, New Zealand born Slavko Martinov found himself more and more critical of everything he was seeing, reading, and hearing, and wanted to get to the bottom of the 'united recipe behind all the lies'. He set out to make a film about propaganda, despite never having made a feature film before.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda

# data[].attributes.headline
(20) Fake news wasn’t the biggest media problem of 2016 - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
(20) Fake news wasn’t the biggest media problem of 2016 - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
fake news isn't the biggest media problem of 2016

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fake news wasn’t the biggest media problem of 2016

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's nothing new, and it didn't swing the election. Subscribe to our channel! http://goo.gl/0bsAjO Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com to get up to speed on everything from Kurdistan to the Kim Kardashian app.

# data[].attributes.headline
(17) How to Control What People Do | Propaganda - EDWARD BERNAYS | Animated Book Summary - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
(17) How to Control What People Do | Propaganda - EDWARD BERNAYS | Animated Book Summary - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Control What People Do | Propaganda - EDWARD BERNAYS | Animated Book Summary

# data[].attributes.headline
(17) 10 Extreme Examples of Propaganda - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
(17) 10 Extreme Examples of Propaganda - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Throughout history those after power have used extreme propaganda to influence and manipulate the masses. From the ISIS executioner Jihadi John, to the blockbuster film that gave rise to the KKK, AllTime 10s brings you the 10 most extreme examples of propaganda. Music = Breaking Point by Dave James / Adam Skinner / Dan Skinner Click to Subscribe..

# data[].attributes.headline
(20) Capitalism vs Communism - Freedom versus Oppression - Propaganda Cartoon - Cold War 1940s - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
(20) Capitalism vs Communism - Freedom versus Oppression - Propaganda Cartoon - Cold War 1940s - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Era Propaganda Cartoon on Capitalism & Free Enterprise

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Capitalism vs Communism - Freedom versus Oppression - Propaganda Cartoon - Cold War 1940s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Make Mine Freedom - Freedom to live how you want - worker, tycoon, kids in the malt shop versus communist ideology. People made to try communism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Play the fake news game! How bad are you? Become a fake news tycoon and get as many followers as you can.

# data[].attributes.headline
Break Your Own News - Breaking News Generator

# data[].attributes.subject
Break Your Own News - Breaking News Generator

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Breaking News Generator - Today's top story... you! Or, whatever you want. Add your pic, write the headline and we'll go live to the scene. Sort of.

Your browser does not support HTML5 Canvas.

No images are saved to the servers of Break Your Own News.

By @JonathanEx. Find out more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Break Your Own News - The Breaking News Generator

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today's top story... you! Or, whatever you want. Add your pic, write the headline and we'll go live to the scene. Sort of.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create your own (fake) news empire by playing Fake It To Make It, a simulation-style, social-impact game about how fake news is created and distributed for a profit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
During World War II, George Soros was a member of the SS (a Nazi paramilitary organization) or a Nazi collaborator who helped confiscate property from Jews.

False

As a prominent political activist and supporter of left-wing causes, Hungarian-born billionaire financier George Soros has frequently been the target of smear campaigns, none more odious than the persistent - and false - claim that Soros, a Jew, was a Nazi sympathizer, collaborator, and/or paramilitary officer during World War II.

That Soros was only nine years old (born in 1930) when the war broke out and all of 14 when Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945 hasn't dampened his detractors' enthusiasm for spreading these rumors, of which none is more absurd than the claim, which first surfaced in November 2016, that Soros literally served as an officer of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel ( SS) in Germany.

Here is an example via Twitter:

GEORGE SOROS- REMEMBER THIS THE NEXT TIME THE SOROS-FUNDED LIBERALS CALL YOU A RACIST, FACIST, OR NAZI! pic.twitter.com/qU7FwGzHcQ

- Phx Ken (@PhxKen) June 15, 2017

This allegation continues to make the social media rounds in the form of a black-and-white photograph of a young man - supposedly Soros - wearing an SS uniform (see above), accompanied by some version of this caption:

.. I give you George Soros. A SS in the National Socialist German workers party. Nazi party. He served under Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. He said it was the best time of his life. The destruction and agony around him was euphoric to him. This man was making policy with Hillary Clinton. And some of you think Trump is dangerous. Wow!

Wow, indeed. But given his age, Soros couldn't have joined the SS (whose minimum age requirement was 17) even if he had wanted to. Moreover, as a Hungarian Jew he couldn't have met the SS requirement for pure "Aryan" heritage. Quite to the contrary, Soros and his entire family were obliged to hide their identities and pose as Christians to avoid being forcibly housed in ghettos, interned in concentration camps, deported, or killed during the 10-month Nazi occupation of Hungary beginning in 1944.

The miscaptioned photo is easily debunked using a reverse image search. The young man in the Waffen-SS uniform is actually Oskar Groening, a Nazi who served at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1942 through the end of the war. More than 70 years after this photograph was taken, Groening was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews.
Was Soros a Nazi Collaborator?
It is also claimed that Soros survived the German occupation of Budapest by becoming a Nazi "collaborator." Fox News pundit Glenn Beck alleged in November 2010, for example, that the 14-year-old Soros "help[ed] the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors," and, worse (in Beck's view), was unrepentant about it:

So when George Soros was 14, his father basically bribed a government official to take his son in and let him pretend to be a Christian. His father was just trying to keep him alive. He even had to go around confiscating property of Jewish people.

Now, imagine you are Jewish and you have to go and confiscate the property of your fellow Jews. And you are pretending to not be a Jew and if anybody finds out, you're dead. He actually had to endure watching people sent off to their eventual murders, watching people gathering their stuff, sending them off knowing that they were going to go to their death.

"I don't want to question the 14-year-old," Beck disingenuously stated during a serious of broadcasts devoted to painting Soros as an evil "puppet-master" of the left. "I would have, however, liked to question the 80-year-old man who has never once said he regretted it," he added.

Central to Beck's case were quotes and clips from a 1998 60 Minutes interview (which can be viewed in its entirety here), an excerpt from which was also used as the centerpiece in a commentary on the conspiracist web site InfoWars.com in which host Alex Jones claimed that the teenaged Soros "helped round up thousands of people" and "stole hundreds of millions of dollars" from Hungarian Jews on behalf of the Nazi occupiers:

Conservative author Dinesh D'Souza (who has gone so far as to compare the 14-year-old George Soros to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele) revived the "Nazi collaborator" claim in his 2017 book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, doubling down on it in a social media campaign to promote book sales:

.@georgesoros, now a principle financial backer of violent #Antifa thugs, admits his collaboration with Hitler and says he has no regrets: pic.twitter.com/P1Xl1vo87T

- Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) September 2, 2017

Other conservative and alt-right media figures followed suit:

Soros was Nazi collaborator. He laughed about it. https://t.co/N41dkcDG6y

- Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) September 13, 2017

#Nazi collaborator #GeorgeSoros in his own words, while other Jews his age had died fighting Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto... pic.twitter.com/xXp9JYQZts

- James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 18, 2017

Media Matters sugar daddy is George Soros, WHO IDENTIFIED JEWS TO THE NAZIS, as he admitted on 60 Minutes - http://t.co/lOUQKWnCqL

- Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 12, 2015

Yet the simple truth is that George Soros neither said nor did anything resembling what he has been accused of. In no sense was Soros, who turned 14 years old not long after the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944, a "Nazi collaborator." At no time did he confiscate (or help confiscate) the property of Jews, "identify Jews to the Nazis," or help "round up" people targeted for deportation or extermination by the Germans (to answer just a few of the accusations leveled against him). And although Soros did attest during the infamous 60 Minutes interview that he regrets nothing about the time of German occupation, he also said it is precisely because he didn't do any of the things attributed to him that his conscience is clear.
The 60 Minutes Interview
The 60 Minutes interview is problematic in many regards, not least in that Soros's testimony comes across as confused and contradictory. After assenting to Kroft's (inaccurate) statement that he "helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews," for example, a minute later Soros says he was only a spectator and played no role in that confiscation:

Kroft: "My understanding is that you went ... went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."
Soros: "Yes, that's right. Yes."

Kroft: "I mean, that's - that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

Soros: "Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't ... you don't see the connection. But it was - it created no - no problem at all."

Kroft: "No feeling of guilt?"

Soros: "No."

Kroft: "For example, that, 'I'm Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.' None of that?"

Soros: "Well, of course, ... I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was - well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in the markets - that if I weren't there - of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would - would - would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the - whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the - I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt. "

Soros's biographer, Michael T. Kaufman, describes Soros as "visibly dumbfounded" by Kroft's "prosecutorial" line of questioning. In his book, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire (Knopf, 2002), Kaufman addresses the claim that Soros was involved in confiscating Jewish property. While it's true that one of the jobs delegated to young George's temporary protector, a Hungarian bureaucrat named Baumbach, was taking inventory of Jewish properties already confiscated by the Nazis, Kaufman writes, the extent of Soros's participation was accompanying Baumbach on one of these assignments:

Shortly after George went to live with Baumbach, the man was assigned to take inventory on the vast estate of Mor Kornfeld, an extremely wealthy aristocrat of Jewish origin. The Kornfeld family had the wealth, wisdom, and connections to be able to leave some of its belongings behind in exchange for permission to make their way to Lisbon. Baumbach was ordered to go to the Kornfeld estate and inventory the artworks, furnishings, and other property. Rather than leave his "godson" behind in Budapest for three days, he took the boy with him. As Baumbach itemized the material, George walked around the grounds and spent time with Kornfeld's staff. It was his first visit to such a mansion, and the first time he rode a horse. He collaborated with no one and he paid attention to what he understood to be his primary responsibility: making sure that no one doubted that he was Sandor Kiss [Soros's assumed identity]. Among his practical concerns was to make sure that no one saw him pee.

George's father, Tivadar Soros, provided a similar account of the incident in his 1965 autobiography, Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Occupied Hungary (note: Tivadar gives the name of the ministry official as "Baufluss," but Soros confirmed to us that the correct name is Baumbach):

Baufluss was charged by the ministry with inventorying confiscated Jewish estates. He was home only at weekends; the rest of his time he spent taking inventory in the provinces. During the week George passed his time alone in Baufluss' s apartment. Lacking anything else to do, he caught the attention of some of his schoolmates, who lived in the building across the way. Communicating by hand signals, they seemed surprised to see him holed up in somebody else's house. The following week the kind-hearted Baufluss, in an effort to cheer the unhappy lad up, took him off with him to the provinces. At the time he was working in Transdanubia, west of Budapest, on the model estate of a Jewish aristocrat, Baron Moric Kornfeld. There they were wined and dined by what was left of the staff. George also met several other ministry officials, who immediately took a liking to the young man, the alleged godson of Mr Baufluss. He even helped with the inventory. Surrounded by good company, he quickly regained his spirits. On Saturday he returned to Budapest.

"He even helped with the inventory," Tivadar Soros wrote - a detail one doesn't find in Kaufman's book. Some may rush to cite this as proof that Soros was a "collaborator" after all, but given that it occurred on only one occasion, and that Soros was under an imperative to convincingly play the part of Baumbach's godson while in the company of the actual Nazi collaborators, it doesn't fly.

Moreover, these biographical passages demonstrate that Steve Kroft's claim on 60 Minutes that Soros "accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews" is flat-out false. Tivadar Soros wrote that most of young George's time under Baumbach's care was spent alone in the latter's apartment. Both Tivadar and Kaufman report that George only resided with Baumbach for a short time - a matter of weeks - before Tivadar, concerned that his son's real identity was in danger of exposure, shipped him off to spend the summer of 1944 with his mother (who herself was living under an assumed name at a lakeside resort some distance from Budapest). George Soros spent no further time with Baumbach.
Did Soros Serve Jews with Death or Deportation Notices?
Another "Nazi collaborator" trope holds that young George Soros helped send fellow Jews to their deaths by delivering deportation notices on behalf of Budapest's Jewish Council ( Judenrat in German), an organization tasked by the Nazis with helping enforce Nazi policies on the Hungarian Jewish population:

People Soros deported to Auschwitz

Soros served Jews with "death notices" to go to Auschwitz
https://t.co/mWVzcN2SlJ:

- KellyLeeMedia (@jasian12345) August 23, 2017

YOUNG SOROS delivered notices for Nazis informing Jews of deportation
Later promoted to listing their confiscated property
'Happiest youth'

- armageddon #bluehand (@davis_blackwood) November 15, 2016

However, as in the case of the "confiscation" rumors already discussed, here we find innocuous facts about George Soros's adolescence twisted and exaggerated into nothing less than a grotesque lie. According to Soros's father, school-age Jewish children were required to run errands for the council. Among those errands (he came to find out) was delivering deportation notices to prominent Jews. But although George did, in fact, spend all of two days as a Jewish Council errand boy, he didn't perform his assigned tasks exactly as ordered, taking it upon himself to warn the recipients of the notices that they ought not to comply:

As Jews couldn't go to school any more and their teachers couldn't teach, they were ordered to report to council headquarters. The children were enlisted as couriers under the command of their teachers. My younger son, George, also became a courier. On the second day he returned home at seven in the evening.

'What did you do all day?'

'Mostly nothing. But this afternoon I was given some notices to deliver to various addresses.'

'Did you read what they said?'

'I even brought one home.'

He handed me a small slip of paper, with a typewritten message:
You are requested to report tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock at the Rabbinical Seminary in Rokk Szildrd Street. Please bring with you a blanket, and food for two days. THE JEWISH COUNCIL
'Do you know what this means?' I asked him.

'I can guess,' he replied with great seriousness. 'They'll be interned.'

Children are often good guessers. I wondered whether he knew what being interned meant. Did this child of mine realize that these people would be deported to Germany and very possibly murdered? I felt too ashamed of the world I had brought him into to enlighten him.

'The Jewish Council has no right to give people orders like that,' I told him. 'You are not to work there any more.'

'I tried to tell the people I called on not to obey,' he said, clearly disappointed that I wouldn't let him work any more. He was beginning to enjoy his career as a courier: it was all a big adventure.

Did Soros Say Helping the Nazis was the Happiest Time of His Life?
In a foreword George Soros wrote for a 2011 reprint of Masquerade, he described the ten months of the Nazi occupation as "the happiest times of my life":

I was fourteen years old. We were in great peril, but my father was seemingly in command of the situation. I was aware of the dangers because my father spent a lot of time explaining them to me but I did not believe in my heart of hearts that I could get hurt. We were pursued by evil forces and we were clearly on the side of the angels because we were unjustly persecuted; moreover, we were trying not only to save ourselves but also to save others. The odds were against us but we seemed to have the upper hand. What more could a fourteen-year-old want? I adored and admired my father. We led an adventurous life and we had fun together.

Predictably, this statement has been repurposed by Soros's political enemies, usually in tandem with the false claim that he was a Nazi collaborator, as an admission of moral bankruptcy:

Soros =Funds BLM + Antifa + United Nations hate-fest NGO's. "Happiest days of my life were helping the Nazi's in Hungary in 1944" said Soros https://t.co/TbtZmNs833

- Lloyd (@pood57) September 9, 2017

George Soros: (Helping Nazis) "Was The Happiest Time of my Life" https://t.co/B8G1ZiY4Ze

- California4TRUMP (@Tra777) September 5, 2017

But at no time did Soros say "helping Nazis" was the happiest time of his life. As he has reiterated on numerous occasions, what he was referring to was the exhilaration of surviving the most perilous situation he and his family would ever face, under the guidance and tutelage of his father, whom George Soros saw as a heroic figure. "It was his finest hour," Soros said of his father in his 2007 book, The Age of Fallibility:

1944 became the formative experience of my life. I was fourteen and I had boundless admiration for my father. I absorbed and adopted his view of the world wholesale. As I have often said, the year of German occupation was a strangely positive experience for me. We were confronted by mortal danger and people perished all around us, but we managed not only to survive but to emerge victorious because we were able to help so many others. We were on the side of the angels and we triumphed against overwhelming odds. What more can a fourteen-year-old ask for?

Anti-Defamation League Statement
One of the ironies of these attacks on Soros based on his survival of the Nazi occupation is that they use his own (and his father's) candid remembrances of the experience to vilify him. As Holocaust survivor and Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman stated in response to Glenn Beck's attempted takedown of Soros in 2010, regardless of how one feels about the adult George Soros and his politics, the attacks are morally repugnant and unacceptable:

Glenn Beck's description of George Soros' actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top. For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say - inaccurately - that there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that's horrific.

While I, too, may disagree with many of Soros' views and analysis on the issues, to bring in this kind of innuendo about his past is unacceptable. To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.

The Holocaust was a horrific time, and many people had to make excruciating choices to ensure their survival. George Soros has been forthright about his childhood experiences and his family's history, and there the matter should rest.

Updated [19 September 2017]: Added more details and sources.

Correction [4 February 2018]: Corrected misspelling of Tivadar Soros's first name.

Phillip, Abby. "The Moral Guilt of Oskar Groening, the 'Accountant of Auschwitz.'"
The Washington Post. 21 April 2015.

Kaufman, Michael T. Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire.
New York: Knopf, 2002. ISBN 9780375405853, p. 37.

Soros, George. The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror.
New York: PublicAffairs, 2007. ISBN 9781586485337, p. 30.

Soros, Tivadar. Dancing Around Death in Nazi Occupied Hungary.
New York: Arcade Publishing, 1965 (reprinted 2011). ISBN 9781611450248.

Anti-Defamation League. "Glenn Beck's Remarks About Soros And The Holocaust 'Offensive And Over The Top.'"
11 November 2010.

BBC News. "'Auschwitz Bookkeeper' Oskar Groening Sentenced to Four Years."
15 July 2015.

Biography.com. "George Soros."
23 August 2016.

The Jewish News of Northern California. "Glenn Beck Attack on George Soros Outrages Jewish Leaders."
12 November 2010.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
FACT CHECK: Was George Soros an SS Officer or Nazi Collaborator During World War II?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During World War II, George Soros was a member of the SS (a Nazi paramilitary organization) or a Nazi collaborator who helped confiscate property from Jews.

# data[].attributes.headline
50 Powerful Examples Of Visual Propaganda And The Meanings Behind Them – Design School

# data[].attributes.subject
50 Powerful Examples Of Visual Propaganda And The Meanings Behind Them – Design School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Deceitful, manipulative, persuasive or informative? However you perceive it, propaganda has been used to change the way the world thinks and behaves for thousands of years.

These days, thanks to a history of it being used to drive harmful or discriminatory messages, propaganda generally carries a negative connotation. But propaganda can be used effectively to relay positive messages, like health recommendations, PSAs, and encouraging people to vote.

We've curated a collection of 50 prominent examples of propaganda, positive and negative, throughout history. If we've missed any notable ones, let us know in the comment section below!

01. I Want You

What's now regarded as the most famous poster in the world, the poster first appeared on the cover of Leslie's Weekly on July 6, 1916 (as the United States was entering World War I) with the title, 'What Are You Doing for Preparedness?' The poster showed Uncle Sam pointing directly at the viewer, compelling them to action.

02. What Did YOU Do?

This poster was created by British illustrator Savile Lumley and was used in World War I to compel men with families to enlist. The aim of the poster was to strike at their pride, persuading them that in the future their children would judge them not for their decision to support their family back home, but for their wartime contribution.

03. Be careful what you say

This simple poster from the Second World War sent the clear message to the civilians of the Allied Powers that Hitler's Germany had means of listening into their communications.

04. We Can Do It!

Another incredibly popular poster worldwide was created by J. Howard Miller in 1943. Originally, it was created for Westinghouse Electric and used strictly internally to boost the morale of women who already worked at the company, rather than to recruit women to come to work. The poster was rediscovered in the early 80s and used to promote feminism, and is often mistaken for Rosie the Riveter.

05. Rosie the Riveter

Rosie the Riveter was created in 1943 by Norman Rockwell, and actually represents the American women that worked in the munitions and war supplies factories in WWII. It served as a call to arms for women to become strong and capable in order to support the war effort.

06. Chinese 'Rosie the Riveter'

This poster is similar to the American Rosie the Riveter, and was created by Ning Hao. It shows women being asked to work in factories alongside men, but only partially empowering them. The main purpose of this poster was to increase the workforce in China.

07. Che Guevara

Created by Jim Fitzpatrick and based on a famous photograph by Alberto Korda, this image became famous worldwide during the Vietnam war protests, and was used during the Paris student riots in 1960. It is viewed as everything from a revolution inspiring icon to a retro logo.

08. Thief!

This poster goes against child labor, and shows small children working hard while a large and portly man looks on with bags of money at his feet. It depicts him as stealing their innocence and childhood, due to the incredibly dangerous nature of the jobs they were forced to work to help feed themselves and their families while being paid incredibly small sums.

09. Anti-Smoking

A powerful anti-smoking statement, this poster borrows from the classic Atari game Pong. The cigarette acts as one of the 'paddles' and keeps ticking away at the lungs one piece at a time. The viewer knows that if the game were to continue, the lungs would be destroyed completely, which ultimately symbolizes a 'game over' - or death.

10. It's our flag

A poster commissioned by the London Parliamentary Recruiting Committee in 1915. This one appealed to the sense of patriotism of its audience, using the British flag as a symbol to encapsulate what needed protecting.

11. Buy War Bonds

Encouraging people to buy war bonds was an incredibly popular propaganda message, and an example can be seen here. It shows three children underneath a shadow of the Nazi symbol, along with the message 'don't let that shadow touch them, buy war bonds'. This message implies that if you don't support the war financially, harm could come to your children, playing on people's fear. It was incredibly successful.

12. Together

This poster was created in Britain during WWII. It shows an array of different types of British citizens all coming together in a time of need. The ideas of race and class are completely disregarded, and it encourages everyone to come together and help their country.

13. Perks of Joining the Submarine Service

Playing on the desires of men, this poster alludes to the idea that joining the service will attract women. It promoted the idea that serving was fun and full of rewards, and chose not to show any negativity or harsh imagery to 'scare' people into joining.

14. Someone Talked!

This poster created during WWII was aimed at dissuading people from talking about the war and revealing important information about the US Navy to potential spies. It depicts a man, floating in a body of water (seemingly after his warship had been sunk), with the message "Someone Talked".

15. For You and Your Country's Sake

This propaganda poster encourages women to join the armed forces 'for themselves and their country.' It portrays the women as strong and stoic, looking towards the future, together. Perhaps they are looking towards the future of the country, or their families' futures.

16. Change to a Victory Job

A poster commissioned in Australia in 1943 to encourage the country's women to trade in their civilian jobs for war jobs. With her fist clenched and her expression serious and urgent, the woman here was depicted as a strong, independent and active contributor to Australia's war efforts.

17. Keep Cool with Coolidge

This is a campaign poster for Calvin Coolidge's 1924 campaign. It shows him steering the 'Ship of the State' alongside Columbia, who is the female personification of the United States. It has his famous slogan 'Keep Cool with Coolidge' at the top, and portrays him as collected and in charge of where the country is going.

18. Vote for Peace

This is an anti-war poster, and shows the death tolls for both American and Vietnamese soldiers during the Vietnam war. It says that the war is over for them, because they're dead, but can be over for everyone if they vote for 'peace'.

19. Liberators

This Nazi propaganda poster depicts the people of the United States as domineering and portraying a number of negative 'characteristics' of American citizens. They show them as money-grubbing and racist, and are encouraging the German people to look at Americans in a negative way.

20. Looking for Hope

Another Nazi poster, this one shows starving and homeless Germans, and has the message that Hitler is their only hope for survival ("unsere letzte hoffnung: Hitler" means "Our last hope: Hitler.")

21. Knit Your Bit

The American Red Cross created this poster to encourage women to 'knit their bit', and contribute to the war efforts by knitting socks for soldiers. Since most military clothes were produced in factories, socks weren't actually needed to be knitted by citizens, but the poster acted to create patriotic involvement.

22. Build Tanks

This poster encourages Russians to help the country build more tanks in order to defeat Nazi Germany. It shows both a man and a woman looking out into space. They look strong and hopeful, giving Russian citizens hope that the war will come to an end.

23. The Emancipation of Russian Women

Another Russian poster, this one shows the emancipation of Russian women. Instead of showing her in the workforce, they defeminized her, making her look like a man. This in turn made the poster into an effort to increase labor in both men and women.

24. Work in Britain

This poster is Britain's version of Russia's emancipation poster, but actually shows the woman as a woman. It calls for women to join the workforce, but gives them a powerful stance and a purpose.

25. Talk Less

This propaganda poster, again from the era of the Second World War, warns of the risk of German spies infiltrating the civilian communities of the Allied Powers. This message was spread consistently during the war and for some time after it was over.

26. Women of Britain Say Go!

Another propaganda poster from World War I, used to encourage British to let their men leave home soil to take up arms in the war efforts on the European continent. Much of the propaganda disseminated during both of the world wars was targeted at women "back home."

27. Socialism Throttling The Country

This poster was commissioned by the Conservative Party in Britain in 1909. It depicted the "beast" of socialism endangering the plight of British prosperity.

28. Get a War Job

This poster encourages women who were left behind by loved ones who went off to war to get a war job. It manipulates their emotions and plays off of their loneliness, promoting the idea that working would help them pass the time.

29. Money or A Life

This WWI poster plays on emotions again - a common occurrence in war propaganda. The intention is clear: that a failure to donate funds would likely result indirectly in the death of an American soldier.

30. Lick Them Over There!

Canada officially entered the Second World War on 10 September, 1939. This poster, designed to encourage Canadian men to join the fight in Europe, used the imagery of the soldier with one foot in Canada and one in Europe to symbolize the pressing threat on national security.

31. Grow a Garden

This poster was created for the United States Food Administration in 1918 by William McKee. It encourages American families to grow their own gardens (dubbed Victory Gardens) during WWII to help conserve food.

32. Gaza One Year On

Another modern poster, which is titled 'Gaza One Year On, Still In Ruins'. It shows how destructed and devastated the city still is after all of the bombings it endured from Israel.

33. Manchukuo

This propaganda poster promotes harmony between the Japanese, Chinese, and Manchu peoples. Their flags are in the background, and the caption reads 'with the cooperation of Japan, China, and Manchukuo the world can be in peace.' The people look happy and peaceful, and are linking arms in camaraderie.

34. Is This Tomorrow?

This is the cover of a propaganda comic book. It shows what tomorrow 'could' look like for Americans if the United States became a Communist country. It shows the flag in flames, and innocent citizens being abused by Communists.

35. Join The Communist Party

This poster was commissioned by the Communist Party of New Zealand in the 1940s. The slogan, "This Way To Progress", and the designers choice of having every element in the poster directed to the right hand side of the page, combines to represent the notion that communism is the answer to take the world forward.

36. A Woman's Right To Vote

The plight for women to claim their right to vote came to a head in the United States in 1920, when the right was officially granted. This was a women's suffrage flyer circulated that year, spreading the message that the right had been claimed, and should be exercised.

37. Wake Up America

This poster shows a personification of America sleeping, urging the country to wake up and do its part in the war efforts of WWI.

38. There's Still A Place For You

This poster was commissioned by the London Parliamentary Recruiting Committee in 1915. It depicted a line of battle-ready soldiers, with a space "reserved for a fit man". The imagery and language used in the poster compelled men of action to join their comrades in the fight.

39. Hope

This iconic image represents Obama's presidential campaign. It shows him as a symbol of hope, and is very reminiscent of the Che Guevara poster - which is a reflection of the revolution of the young generations who supported Obama's campaign.

40. Buy War Bonds

Another poster that scares families into buying war bonds, this one takes a different approach and shows the enemy as monsters. Their long, pointed fingers are stretched out to an iconic looking American woman and her innocent baby. If you don't buy war bonds, those hands could reach them, and end their lives.

41. Death and Fascism

This poster reads 'The world now knows that the Fascists have nothing to offer the youth but death.' It shows a skeleton removing a mask, which is the face of Hitler, and alludes to the fall of the Nazi regime.

42. Starship Troopers

This poster was made for the military science fiction book Starship Troopers. It says 'the only good bug is a dead bug,' and shows military men ready for a fight. It promotes action and encourages people to enlist.

43. Together We Can Do It

This poster shows two men rolling up their sleeves and coming together to get down to work. It encourages camaraderie between the staff and management at GM. You can see the distinction not only by the labels, but by the 'blue collar' and 'white collar' shirts.

44. Is he your child?

This poster, commissioned by one of the Allied countries in 1943, played on the emotions of its target audience: parents. The innocent-looking child, with the war scenes in the background, is struggling under the weight and size of the Nazi cap and the skull badge pinned over his heart acted to reinforce the sense of fear.

45. Silence Means Security

Another propaganda poster used by the Allied Forces in World War II to spread the message of silence amongst civilians, particularly female civilians. This one used the imagery of a woman dressed in a military outfit to appeal directly to its target audience.

46. I Want You for the Navy

Taking a leaf out of Uncle Sam's 'I Want You' poster, instead of portraying Uncle Sam, they portray an attractive woman. She is saying 'She Wants You for the Navy', and again plays on men's desires for women to get them to enlist.

47. Nixon's the One

Richard Nixon ran a campaign that asked voters who they would want to lead the country, which resulted in the slogan 'Nixon is the One'. A political strategist and prankster, Dick Tuck, hired groups of pregnant women to go to Nixon rallies wearing buttons sporting the slogan, which indicated he was 'the one' for a number of other areas as well.

48. I Want You F.D.R

The idea of 'I Want You' was used in many propaganda posters, this one included. It was used to F.D.R's advantage, and helped him secure his fourth term as President. It shows Uncle Sam pointing to F.D.R and telling him he wants him to finish the job, that America needs him to finish the job.

49. V for Victory

This illustrated poster shows employees and management coming together, and in doing so 'cracking' Hitler and Hirohito. It encourages camaraderie at work, and promotes the idea that working together can end the war.

50. The Working Man's President

This campaign poster aimed to get the labor vote. It shows Grant and Wilson (potential President and Vice President) as hard working men, and represents the idea that they will both work hard for America.

There you have it: 50 examples of visual propaganda and the stories they tell. While most uncover dark and regretful features of our past, it's heartening to know that through history propaganda tactics have been harnessed to bring about positive change. Which one did you find most compelling?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
50 Powerful Examples Of Visual Propaganda And The Meanings Behind Them - Learn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Deceitful, manipulative, persuasive or informative? However you perceive it, propaganda has been used to change the way the world thinks and behaves for thousands of years. These days, thanks to a history of it being used to drive harmful or discriminatory messages, propaganda generally carries a negative connotation.

# data[].attributes.headline
6 Famous Movies You Probably Didn’t Notice Are Propaganda | Cracked.com

# data[].attributes.subject
6 Famous Movies You Probably Didn’t Notice Are Propaganda | Cracked.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For as long as there has been a film industry, concerned parents have warned kids that their favorite movies are trying to turn them into violent, promiscuous, Satan-worshipping commies. Well, it turns out that lots of famous movies are trying to brainwash you with their secret agendas -- though half the time it's not even clear if the filmmakers were aware of it.

For instance ...

It's hard to imagine George Lucas having any secret agenda for Star Wars, unless the whole thing was secretly a piece of performance art to teach us a lesson about stopping while you're ahead. What many people don't realize, however, is that Lucas actually has some pretty strong political opinions, and he wanted them reflected in his films. For example, the classic anti-war film Apocalypse Now was originally his idea, and he wanted to film it during the actual Vietnam War. As in, with real bullets flying at his real, bearded face.

No studio wanted to be responsible for Lucas' headless cadaver, so the film ended up with Francis Ford Coppola while Lucas went to direct another, almost as politically charged film ... called Star Wars.

Unwilling to give up fully on his anti-Vietnam sentiment just because he was doing a movie about spacemen fighting with laser swords, Lucas modeled Star Wars' central conflict around what he saw as the realities of Vietnam -- namely, "a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters." Yep, he basically saw the Empire as a stand-in for America, while the rebellion was just the inevitable result of the overextension of its powers. So Princess Leia was ... Ho Chi Minh, we guess?

All of this subversive anti-Vietnam sentiment culminated in what's considered the most childish movie of the original trilogy, Return Of The Jedi. The film features a small group of technologically inferior, vegetation-dwelling guerrilla fighters who manage to defeat an empire against the odds. Yes, the Ewoks are a stand-in for the Viet Cong.

Lucasfilm, US Army
Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Lucas has consistently claimed a wider, political context to his films, but says "nobody was aware of that." This might be due to his decision to represent years of ugly guerrilla warfare as a battle between teddy bears and bumbling clones, but maybe it's our fault for not picking up the allegory when we were watching this movie at age nine.

Angry Birds is undeniably the best animated movie based on a mobile app to come out in 2016. Despite being a laughably transparent cash-grab, the movie actually boasts pretty solid animation and a surprisingly impressive stable of household-name actors. Also surprisingly, it enjoys an exceptionally staunch anti-immigration message, just in case your children hadn't yet embraced the alt-right.

The film's protagonist, Red, is ostracized by bird society for being too darn angry -- much like your talk-radio-addicted uncle who writes Facebook posts in all caps and doesn't understand why no one comes to his birthday.

When bearded, ridiculous-headwear-wearing pigs from "across the sea" come to the birds' little island, supposedly in peace, nobody listens to Red's reservations. Only he believes these pigs (who have an unhealthy obsession with explosives) may have ulterior motives. Red even questions why the birds did not properly vet the incoming immigrants, wondering, "How do we know [they're] not criminals?"

One of Red's suspicions comes from the notion that the pigs have a "king," while bird society is free and democratic. He instantly hates and distrusts these foreigners for being different ... and it turns out he's right. The pigs betray the birds and blow their island to shit, then steal all of the birds' eggs/unborn children for food. As a result, the whole island looks like ground zero.

In response to this act of terrorism, Red assembles all the birds and trains those liberal pussies to embrace their inner anger. Once that's achieved, the birds begin bombing pig island back into the middle ages -- as in the game, they repeatedly fling their bodies at the pig's buildings and until they've leveled the entire city.

There's no sort of resolution with the pigs besides mindless violence and destruction -- all that's left is a smoking pile of rubble with pig corpses presumably rotting underneath. In the future, they'll know just to kill any pigs they see on sight.

On a weirdly similar note ...

World War Z so thoroughly deviated from the beloved source material, angry nerds were forced to respond by making it Brad Pitt's most successful film ever. One of the few things the producers made sure to adapt from the book, though, was Israel's zombie apocalypse defense strategy. In both book and film, the country builds a big-ass wall around Jerusalem to keep out all the undead undesirables -- making it one of only a couple of spots on Earth to escape the chaos.

Already, you can see hints of nationalism if not outright xenophobia: "See? The guys who wanted to build a wall to keep everyone out were right all along!" Unfortunately, they made one tiny mistake -- they let people in. Palestinians are allowed to enter and, happy to be saved, start singing with the Israelis in celebration. It begins as a joyous, inspirational moment ... but zombies hate singing, apparently.

Paramount Pictures
"Just a small tooooooown girl!"

The undead start throwing themselves at the wall and, within minutes, create a massive, living flesh mountain, allowing hundreds of them to climb over the wall and ultimately kill the revelers. That's literally what brings about the downfall of Israel: they let some peaceful Palestinians inside their fortress, and God apparently went "Oh hell no."

We're not the only ones to notice the fucked-upness of this message, by the way. Also, note that this is the opposite of how it goes in the book. There, problems arise when a few militant Jews rebel against the government for trying to be inclusive of Palestinians, but they're actually unsuccessful in their attempt. Israel stays safe. In the movie, it's because of inclusion that the wall falls.

The film's point basically becomes, "It may seem like peace between Israelis and Palestinians is possible, but it'll only result in all your flesh being torn off by living corpses! Your naive, soft hearts will be your downfall, Israel!"

As one might expect, not everybody was on board with the tremendous changes in gender equality happening in America in the '60s and '70s -- unlike today, when absolutely everyone is on board, everywhere. This general aversion to progress manifested itself in many ways, from electing more conservative politicians, to pushing for a return to "family values" ... to ass-kicking, gore-filled slasher flicks like Friday The 13th.

One of the more commonly well-known tropes of the slasher genre is the idea of the "Final Girl" -- the smart, resourceful female character who manages to outlive all her friends and eventually finds a way to defeat the monster. While on the surface this might seem pretty empowering and badass, there's one specific reason why she gets to live and not the others: She hasn't been boned.

The girl at the end of an '80s slasher is almost always a virgin, and every girl who is killed is almost always sexualized in some way -- because, on some level, we feel like they had it coming. This dichotomy is painfully evident in Friday The 13th, where the very first people killed are two horny teenagers having sex.

Marcie is murdered almost immediately after sex with Jack, and Brenda is killed not long after suggesting they all play strip Monopoly. When Mrs. Voorhees finally reveals herself as the killer, she claims that her son Jason drowned because two counselors were having sex instead of watching him. The entire movie, and thus the franchise, happened because of teenage horniness.

Only Alice remains "pure" throughout the film by rebuffing the creepy boss' advances, and it's because of this that she's able to survive. In this way, viewers are supposed to somehow equate sexual promiscuity (and especially female promiscuity) as literally life-threatening. Turns out there was no need for our teachers to show us those terrible, outdated sex-ed videos in school, because we were watching something even more old-fashioned on our own.

Calling Top Gun Pentagon propaganda isn't some Infowars conspiracy bullshit -- it's just a matter of dollars and cents. It turns out that using real military equipment in a movie can be expensive as shit if you're not willing to hijack it. So, in order to keep costs down, the producers made a deal with the government: they could use warplanes and aircraft carriers for a reduced price if they simply gave up some creative control in return.

The Pentagon's thinking was that they could use the movie as an opportunity to paint the Navy in a better light and maybe even jumpstart a little recruiting action. Since Uncle Sam had basically bought and paid for the film, changes were made to the script to make sure the military was always portrayed in a "realistic" (that is, positive) light.

Some notable examples include making sure all dogfights occurred over topographically ambiguous land or water (so as not to anger any real-life countries), making sure pilots only fired after being fired upon, making Maverick less cocky and more of a team player, and changing Goose's death from a mid-air collision to an ejection scene (the Navy didn't like showing people crashing). They even changed the love interest from another soldier to a civilian, since there were no real female officers at Miramar and making both lovers male would of course have been ridiculous.

Paramount Pictures "Homoeroticism? In
Top Gun? That is such a filthy idea that we must all go shower together immediately."

The crazy thing is that the Pentagon's gamble absolutely worked. The movie caused military enlistment to spike and even coincided with a jump in their national approval in polls. When it's all said and done, thanks to Pentagon "assistance," Top Gun is little more than a sexually confused piece of badass military propaganda. Why did director Tony Scott go along with it? In his words, "I didn't have a vision of what I was doing other than just doing soft porn ... I got the guys to get all their gear off and their pants and sprayed them in baby oil." Actually it sounds like he totally had a vision, there.

Wait, again? Yeah, for as liberal as Hollywood claims to be, lots of blockbusters are built on plots involving xenophobes getting proven right.

Man Of Steel is in many ways a war between two types of immigrants: the "good ones" who keep their head low and learn to speak American, and the sinister ones who obviously do everything they do just to spite you. A huge chunk of the movie deals with Superman attempting to learn American/Earth ways and morality ( as taught by Kevin "Tornado Rider" Costner), but he is always aware that he is still an outsider. To honor his adoptive father's ridiculous sacrifice, Clark Kent does everything he can throughout the film to prove that he's an American and "one of us."

When forced to choose between his "native country" (Krypton) and his new home, he sides with Earth, fully demonstrating the depth of his devotion and assimilation. He even goes so far as to claim "I grew up in Kansas ... I'm about as American as it gets."

Conversely, General Zod and his cronies are aliens who refuse to assimilate and even have the nerve to flaunt their cultural heritage. Their most evil act is when they try to take a chunk of our planet and turn it into a version of their own -- just like those shifty immigrants with their noisy neighborhoods.

Eventually, Superman manages to kick out all of his evil countrymen except for Zod, leaving Supes no choice but to murder the guy before he has a chance to hurt (or worse: impregnate) some white people. The Economist notes that the movie's immigration message was so on the nose that an entire "Superman is an immigrant" movement has popped up online.

Fortunately, the next film corrected all of this when all-American Bruce Wayne realizes he and Superman's mothers have the same first name. We're actually not sure how that parallels the real world, unless it's supposed to serve as an object lesson in not waiting until the last minute to finish your screenplay.
Jordan Breeding is a part-time writer, a full-time lover, and an all-the-time guitarist. Check out his band at http://www.skywardband.com or on Spotify here. Think Nana and Pop-Pop's loving 60-year monogamous relationship is quaint and old-fashioned? First off, sorry for that disturbing image, but we've got some news for you: the monogamous sexual relationship is actually brand new relative to how long humans have been around. Secondly, it's about to get worse from here: monkey sex. On this month's live podcast, Jack O'Brien and the Cracked staff welcome Dr. Christopher Ryan, podcaster and author of 'Sex at Dawn', onto the show for a lively Valentine's Day discussion about love, sex, why our genitals are where they are, and why we're more like chimps and bonobos than you think. Get your tickets here: For more examples of Hollywood brainwashing us, check out 5 Kick-Ass Action Movies That Are Pure Propaganda and 5 Famous Movies With Political Agendas You Didn't Notice. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out The Horrifying Secret 'The Matrix' Reveals About Humanity, and other videos you won't see on the site! Follow us on Facebook, and let's be best friends forever.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6 Famous Movies You Probably Didn't Notice Are Propaganda

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For as long as there has been a film industry, concerned parents have warned kids that their favorite movies are trying to turn them into violent, promiscuous, Satan-worshipping commies. Well, it turns out that lots of famous movies are trying to brainwash you with their secret agendas -- though half the time it's not even clear if the filmmakers were aware of it.

# data[].attributes.headline
6 Insane Examples Of Modern Propaganda By Major Countries

# data[].attributes.subject
6 Insane Examples Of Modern Propaganda By Major Countries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Governments around the world spend a ridiculous amount of money on propaganda campaigns to convince either foreigners or their own people that everything is going fine and that their president/monarch/dictator is still, like, the greatest. But propagandists kind of have to work like pickpockets; if they do their job right, the mark will never know they even exist.

That's why it's always hilarious to see how clumsy and tone-deaf most propaganda is. Either these people are terrible at their jobs, or that's just what they want us to think.

Toni Frantois/Moment Mobile/Getty Images

In 2014, a hit new song began to climb the charts on Central American radio. "La Bestia" is an upbeat, jaunty as hell tune that sounds like it could be the theme to Zorro, unless you speak Spanish, in which case you realize this earworm is laying eggs in your brain that will hatch into nightmares.

With lyrics like "The route to hell within a cloud of pains" and "A mortar that crushes, a machete that slices," "La Bestia" tells the story of migrants who travel to America on one of Mexico's freight trains -- or as the song describes it, "this wretched train of death with the Devil in the boiler." The message is clear: If you're thinking about migrating to America, you're probably going to suffer a violent death so miserable that your family won't even remember you to mourn your passing.

The geniuses behind this Hispanic approximation of a Creedence song? None other than the US Customs and Border Protection Agency. It's one of several songs that the US government commissioned to be produced and snuck onto Hispanic radio playlists in an attempt to convince people that attempting to reach the Land of the Free means crossing the apparently Mordor-like hellscape of Central America, and it's better to deal with the cartels.

paule858/iStock/Getty Images
"One does not simply walk to the border."

Of course, Border Protection doesn't disclose the fact that they commissioned the project, so even radio station employees often don't know that the songs are part of a government propaganda campaign, let alone their listeners.

And the USA isn't the only government sneaking anti-immigration messages into foreign entertainment. In 2015, the Australian government handed over $4 million to a production agency to make a movie for Afghan, Syrian, and Iraqi television about the dangers of trying to take a boat to Australia, featuring plotlines about refugees drowning at sea or winding up in one of Australia's deeply unpleasant detention centers. "Trust us, you're better off waiting for the pesky wars to blow over, mate!"

via South China Morning Post

It's notoriously difficult to make film and TV in China, due to the ruling Communist Party's incredibly tough censorship laws. The Chinese government will veto anything they find morally questionable or scientifically unsound, from violence to sexuality to time travel to ghosts, and even propagating a "negative or passive outlook on life" can get a production canned. If they're politically offensive enough, a director can even get banned from shooting anything besides iPhone videos of their cat.

"That cat has appeared in multiple pro-west GIFs. Banned."

Luckily, there's a cheat code to almost guarantee that your artistic vision gets the green light: Simply set the show during Japan's brutal World War II occupation of the country. Oh yeah, and make the communists look like the most heroic badasses who ever waged a guerrilla war. Anti-Japan war dramas have become a favorite genre of the Party, and consequently of filmmakers who just want to blow some shit up without being hassled by the Man.

Over 2011 and 2012, nearly one in every five TV dramas that scored government approval were about the war against Japan. In 2013, Hengdian World Studios was filming 48 of them at the same time. And the best of them make Inglourious Basterds look like a documentary. Highlights include Fabulous Resisting-Japan Hero, wherein a Chinese warrior goes full Mortal Kombat on Japanese soldiers with his bare hands.

This move is known as "splitting the chopsticks."

Then there's The Girl With The Arrows, about a woman who gets raped by Japanese soldiers and immediately develops Hawkeye-scale archery skills.

But perhaps the genre's finest hour is 2015's Let Us Fight The Devils Together, which features a woman blowing up a POW camp after smuggling a bomb inside a dildo.

Of course, the Chinese youth aren't quite as susceptible to large-scale brainwashing as their government seems to believe, so it has been popular in recent years to ruthlessly mock what they nickname "Resisting Japanese Bizarre Dramas," laughing their asses off at the SyFy-level awfulness of the productions and generally taking them about as seriously as Sharknado is taken as a genuine PSA about shark-related weather phenomena.

In response to rising cynicism, Chinese censors attempted to crack down on "overly entertaining" war dramas in 2013. But they're not ready to give up on the genre altogether. In 2015, leading up to the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, they forced TV stations to run 120 hours of programming about it.

State Department

Around the start of the War on Terror, polling showed that the United States wasn't too popular in the Middle East, for some reason. To counteract this, the US State Department began a $4.5 million campaign to show Arabic youth that American culture wasn't all 24-hour bombings and drone strikes. They know how to have fun, too! The result was Hi Magazine.

"High is what we were when we came up with this."

The launch of an American-style pop culture magazine across over a dozen Middle Eastern countries was designed to sell American awesomeness to "the next generation of Arab leaders" and "get them in a dialogue while their opinions are not fully formed." Naturally, the magazine avoided political topics like the plague, and the first issue ran articles about American celebrities, poetry and sandboarding in California. It's already a bad sign when the first editorial meeting brainstormed ways to connect with Arab youth and concluded they must be really into sand.

The State Department tried the Nice Guy approach, desperately trying to ingratiate itself while insisting it had no agenda whatsoever. Which, as Arab critics pointed out, ended up making Hi one of the more pointless reasons anyone has ever mass-murdered trees. The only kids who were interested enough in American culture to pick up the magazine already knew pretty much all there was to know about it, so ironically, they became frustrated by the fact that the USA was selling them tips about the Atkins diet when all they really wanted to know was why they were launching missiles downtown.

"For answers, read our review of State Department
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2."

Only around 2,500 copies were selling a month, with 95 percent given away for free and an undisclosed number of those used to line cat litter trays. The magazine was finally put out of its misery in 2005, when the State Department announced a review to see if it was "meeting its objectives effectively," and then never spoke of it again.

NKNerws.com

It's impossible to write an article about bizarre government propaganda without throwing a bone to North Korea. Ever since the Cold War, the Democratic People's Republic (which is none of those three things) has adorably attempted to convince the Western world that it's actually some sort of paradise. But with precious few avenues for communication, propagandists were relegated to buying full-page ads in Western newspapers to sell their country like a new Kanye West album.

No, really. This appeared in a 1997 issue of The New York Times:

Presumably, the editors of such publications as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sun, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and, for some reason, predominantly The Irish Times were hesitant to run advertisements for the world's most notorious totalitarian regime, but we assume that once they saw the ads, they laughed and figured that not a single one of their readers was going to fall for this shit, so they might as well accept the free money.

And remember that this didn't end in the '60s. Around the same time New Yorkers were anticipating the Seinfeld finale, they were reading a full-page ad in the Times declaring Kim Jong Il to be "a man of great leadership, remarkable wisdom and noble virtues" and calling on Americans to help them smash South Korea's nefarious conspiracy and reunite the country under the glorious rule of the Dear Leader.

via "As your great president once said, 'Today, we celebrate NKNerws.com
our Independence Day!'"

And that Americans should totally buy a copy of the latest bestseller that has been sweeping North Korea by storm:

Now, to be fair to North Korea, they've proven time and time again that they don't really give one red shit about what the rest of the world thinks about them as long as the turkey keeps showing up at the Kim family's buffet table and 25 million starving people don't burst through the door to start a decapitation party. So it's likely that the real reason they did this was to show their own citizens that the top Western publications all can't get enough of the Dear Leader. And we guess, in a funny way, we kind of can't.

Cuba's Internet is notoriously terrible. So Cuban kids were ecstatic in 2009 when a mysterious new company appeared and launched "ZunZuneo," a kind of phone-based social network that was sort of a Twitter knockoff based on text messaging. ZunZuneo let Cubans send free texts to other subscribers, follow each other's posts, and oh yeah, receive messages en masse from the network's anonymous masters. But what nobody realized at the time was that the company was really a front for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the arm of the US government responsible for foreign aid.

The plan, according to information dug up by Associated Press, was initially to play it straight and simply offer Cuban youth a direct line to news, sports, music, and weather. And then, when the time was right, they'd be bombarded with calls for revolution to strike fast and hard against the heart of their corrupt totalitarian government. It's uncertain what kind of emojis would be used in this final stage.

Apple
"How close can you get the poop one to look like Castro?"

To throw the Cuban government off the scent, USAID hid their connection to ZunZuneo behind a web of front companies and Cayman Islands bank accounts so effectively that even the company's executives didn't know that they were working for an American government agency. At the time of its launch, more than 40,000 Cuban youths signed up, with USAID immediately gathering their data to gauge the political climate.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News/Getty Images
The climate is "smh" and "rofl" atm.

Ultimately, of course, ZunZuneo's plans were discovered -- not by Cuba, but by the American press and arms of the government who weren't aware of the scheme, who immediately slammed it as a bugfuck stupid idea (or "cockamamie" in the words of one senator) that would get a lot of people killed and ultimately wind US-Cuba relations back to the Bay of Pigs incident.

USAID formally denies that they ever had plans to use the platform to subvert the Cuban government, despite the wealth of leaked documents and interviews that blatantly suggested that was exactly what they were going to do. Nevertheless, the embarrassed department decided to sell the platform to a private company, but nobody was interested, so ZunZuneo went the way of MySpace in 2012 and inadvertently taught a generation of Cubans that social media is some kind of subtle form of public manipulation wielded by powerful interests with crass ulterior motives. Absurd!

Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Internet comment sections, right? It doesn't matter whether you're reading a news article about foreign relations or watching a YouTube video of a farting giraffe; you only need to scroll down a few inches to see the worst elements of society distilled into a catastrophe of flame wars arguing the extent to which the author is a "cuck." And in recent years, a curious amount of this desktop sophistry has focused on how badass the Russian government is compared to the pussies running the rest of the world.

But have you ever wondered, as you're reading a long forum rant about Vladimir Putin's rippling, muscular, alpha-male physique, whether the author might be under the employ of the Russian government? Or is that just the message being relayed to you from signals you're picking up through your tinfoil hat?

Well, news organizations have in fact discovered that some mysterious and well-funded organization called the Internet Research Agency operates from a rented office building in St. Petersberg, Russia, and according to interviews with people who claim to have worked there, their job is simple: They sit down at the computer, crack open a Mountain Dew (presumably), and spend the day posting pro-Russian propaganda in comment sections, forums, chat rooms, social media, and blogs. They've been referred to as Russia's "troll factory."

John Moore/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Russian economists say it's the only factory left.

Now, the Kremlin officially denies all knowledge that the Internet Research Agency even exists, but if they're not tied to the government, they're nevertheless run by someone who has a seriously rigid hard-on for official Russian foreign relations and government policy. Their employees, paid in cash, mostly comment on Russian-language websites, but the best bonuses go to those who can string together enough words of English to bombard Western websites with pro-Putin comments.

The Guardian suspected something was up back in 2014, while reporting on the Russia/Ukraine armed conflict, noting a suspicious flood of pro-Kremlin posters in their own comment section who claimed to be as British as pig's blood pudding but nevertheless mangled the English language like Ivan Drago in a full-body cast.

And then in 2015, after Russian Opposition Leader Boris Nemtsov was assassinated in the street by, like, probably some random person who discharged his gun accidentally so we don't need an investigation or anything, a whistleblower reported that she was tasked with flooding comment sections and social media with suggestions that there was nothing suspicious about Nemtsov's death, and that it was for the best in any case, and let's face it, he probably tripped and fell on those bullets.

Hey, let's see if any of them show up in the comments under this article!
Blair is on Twitter. Psst ... want to give us feedback on the super-secret beta launch of the upcoming Cracked spinoff site, Braindrop? Well, simply follow us behind this curtain. Or, you know, click here: Braindrop. For more ridiculous attempts at brainwashing the masses, check out The 17 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Propaganda Posters and 30 Hilariously Bizarre Pieces Of Anti-American Propaganda. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out How Breakfast Cereal Mascots Brainwashed You, and watch other videos you won't see on the site! Also, follow us on Facebook. Or don't. But, yo, do it!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
6 Insane Examples Of Modern Propaganda By Major Countries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Governments around the world spend a ridiculous amount of money on propaganda campaigns to convince either foreigners or their own people that everything is going fine and that their president/monarch/dictator is still, like, the greatest. But propagandists kind of have to work like pickpockets; if they do their job right, the mark will never know they even exist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It concluded: "Users tend to aggregate in communities of interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation and polarisation.

* Facebook accused of crashing Android app to test users' loyalty

"This comes at the expense of the quality of information and leads to proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumours, mistrust, and paranoia."

The researchers, from several Italian institutions and Boston University in the US, found that once a piece of information was accepted as fact, it spread rapidly throughout that particular online "community of interest," despite having no proven basis in science.

It noted that scientific information could often be traced, whereas the origins of conspiracy theories such as the controversial belief that vaccines cause autism, were difficult to identify.

"Our findings show that users mostly tend to select and share content related to a specific narrative and to ignore the rest," the paper said.

"Whether a news item, either substantiated or not, is accepted as true by a user may be strongly affected by... how much it coheres with the user's system of beliefs."

* Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says technology will become so advanced that people will be able to send thoughts to their friends

The researchers said the way in which common ideas were shared and reinforced may explain how certain phenomena, such as the rejection of global warming evidence, become widespread.

"This comes at the expense of the quality of the information and leads to proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumours, mistrust, and paranoia," they added.

The scientists warned that the problem of unreliable information going "viral" online had become so serious it was classed of one of the biggest social threats by the World Economic Forum.

"Massive digital misinformation is becoming pervasive in online social media to the extent that it has been listed by the World Economic Forum as one of the main threats to our society," they said.

More than 1 billion people log in to Facebook every day.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook makes us more narrow-minded, study finds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It concluded: "Users tend to aggregate in communities of interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation and polarisation. * Facebook accused of crashing Android app to test users' loyalty "This comes at the expense of the quality of information and leads to proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumours, mistrust, and paranoia."

# data[].attributes.headline
The Truth about Fake Facts | The Evolution Institute

# data[].attributes.subject
The Truth about Fake Facts | The Evolution Institute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I hate to break it to you, gentle reader, but fake facts are nothing new. We are designed by evolution to invent fake facts, fervently believe in them, and even defend them to the death. Still, there is something about the current epidemic of fake facts that should scare us into action.

Imagine grading everything you ever said according to two criteria: 1) How well it corresponds to what's actually out there, and 2) what it causes you and others to do. These can be called factual realism and practical realism, respectively, and they are so familiar that we use the word "realistic" in both senses without needing to think about it. If we're at an art gallery and I comment on how a portrait is realistic, I mean that it corresponds closely to the person being depicted (factual realism). When you outline your latest get rich quick scheme over lunch and I call it unrealistic, I mean that it probably won't work out well for you (practical realism). All of us are experts at toggling between factual realism mode and practical realism mode as warranted by the situation.

Now here's the 64 Million Dollar Question (in my youth it was the 64 Thousand Dollar Question, but we must adjust for inflation)-When does practical realism require factual realism, and when does it require departing from factual realism?

The answer to this question is...drum roll, please..."It depends".

Let's say that you're a Master hunter or a Master gardener. You've earned the title "Master" because of your detailed factual knowledge of your quarry or the plants under your care. Factual and practical realism go together in these cases.

Now imagine that you're a member of a group locked in battle for territory with another group. You could regard them as much just like yourself, competing for the same square of ground. Or, you could regard them as inhuman monsters without a shred of decency, utterly unlike yourself and your noble comrades. The first belief is closer to factual reality (which doesn't deny the possibility legitimate differences in territorial disputes), but the latter belief is likely to be more motivating. Hence, in this and many other cases, a belief can become more practically realistic by becoming less factually realistic.

That's why fake facts are often so tempting, but they go even deeper. Fake facts have been written into our brains by evolution, which "cares" only about the practical realism of survival and reproduction and nothing about factual realism per se. No organism perceives the world as it really is; only aspects that contribute to its survival and reproduction. The rest of the real world is invisible. We cannot sense gravitational fields or mild electrical currents, although other species can. We see only a narrow slice of the light spectrum and even that is distorted into the perception of discrete colors that do not "really" exist, but help us survive and reproduce better than if we saw the light spectrum as the continuum that it really is. It is amazing and humbling, when we pause to think about it, how much we require the instruments of technology and the theories of science to apprehend factual reality as well as we do.

As for our organs of perception, so also for our beliefs. Our minds are designed by natural selection to distinguish between "us" and "them" and to make false attributions about both categories, especially in situations of between-group conflict. We must work hard to overcome these biases if we wish to know the facts of the matter. Yet, in situations where it is important to know the facts of the matter, it can seem quite "natural" to do so and the punishment for failing to honor the facts can be severe. We toggle back and forth between "true fact" mode and "fake fact" mode with ease.

Let's don our anthropologist hat to see how this operates in cultures very different from our own. The Mbuti (formerly known as Pygmies) are master hunters of the equatorial African rainforest. In his classic book The Forest People, Colin Turnbull describes a group of men discussing how to organize the day's hunt. The conversation is entirely in true fact mode, based on their intimate knowledge of the forest and their quarry. Some men are known to be better hunters than others, but the Mbuti (along with most people who live by hunting and gathering) are fiercely egalitarian, so the decision about how to organize the day's hunt must be made by consensus. This, too, could be discussed in matter-of-fact terms, but that's not what happens. Instead, the decision is framed in terms of what will "please the forest." A deity is inserted into a conversation that was otherwise purely a matter of fact. Interesting...

A similar story is told for the master gardeners of Bali by the anthropologist Steve Lansing in his book Priests and Programmers. His informants could talk to him in detail about the facts of the matter, as in this passage: "Because here time controls everything. If there are many rodents and we go ahead and plant rice, obviously we'll get a miserable harvest. So we organize things like this: when the rodent population is large, we see to it that we don't plant things they can eat, so that they will all die-I mean, actually, that their numbers will be greatly reduced pretty quickly." Yet, in the next breath, they could profess belief in an elaborate religion that regulates the maintenance and use of the irrigation system required to grow rice: "Belief...overflowing belief. Concerning Batur temple-really that is the center, the origin of waters, you see. At this moment, the Jero Gde [the high priest] holds all this in his hands." Very interesting...

Closer to home, imagine that you witness a crime and are called to testify at the court trial. You are made to place your hand on the Bible and say "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God". Your testimony must stick to the facts, but a deity-the Christian god-was strategically inserted into the conversation, just as a forest deity was inserted into the conversation among the Mbuti about where to hunt. Very, very interesting.

These three examples illustrate one of the most important contexts for the invention of fake facts- to compel us to behave for the benefit of our group, even when it might be against our private interests. This could be discussed in matter-of-fact terms, just as we could regard our enemies as much like us, but that's not as motivating as the invention of powerful deities that will punish us for failing to place group interests above our private interests. The entire concept of sacredness can be understood largely in these terms. This is why fake facts are ironically needed or at least very useful to enforce truth-telling, as in the case of swearing on a Bible in court.

Thinking clearly about factual and practical realism makes it hard to reject fake facts as categorically bad. Indeed, the reason that we are so gifted at inventing, believing in, and defending them is because they are so good, at least in the evolutionary sense of the word. But that doesn't make them good in the normative sense of the word. Evolution frequently results in outcomes that are selfish and short-sighted by normative standards-good for me but not you, us but not them, or good for all of us today but not tomorrow.

That is what's frightening about the current epidemic of fake facts-their use in a way that is clearly detrimental to the common good. We need to recognize the many situations in modern life when behaving for the common good-practical realism-requires understanding the facts of the matter-factual realism. For these situations, we must be strong in our defense of factual realism, so help us God.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I hate to break it to you, gentle reader, but fake facts are nothing new. We are designed by evolution to invent fake facts, fervently believe in them, and even defend them to the death. Still, there is something about the current epidemic of fake facts that should scare us into action.

# data[].attributes.headline
Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years—and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix it All | WIRED

# data[].attributes.subject
Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years—and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix it All | WIRED

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How a confused, defensive social media giant steered itself into a disaster, and how Mark Zuckerberg is trying to fix it all.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How many animals of each kind did Moses put on the ark?

If you answered two, then congratulations: You're wrong. It wasn't Moses who put animals on the ark; it was Noah. As science has it, this question and others like it illustrate more than just a person's general confusion between two historic religious figures.

"It gets at the extent to which people rely on intuitive answers that pop to their mind as opposed to reflecting and checking whether the answer that comes to mind is right or wrong," says Steve Sloman, a professor of cognitive science at Brown University and editor-in-chief of the journal Cognition.

And in a world where misleading news stories are the new norm, the Moses ark question is a good predictor of whether people are susceptible to fake news. Such is the illusion of explanatory depth, or our tendency to overestimate our understanding of how something works.

It is rooted in our tendency-or lack thereof-to reflect and to double check, Sloman says.

"The trick with fake news is to know to verify, and if you're reflective then you're more likely to engage in that process of verification," Sloman adds.

But it's not always easy to discern factually inaccurate news stories, and we can thank human nature for our propensity to accept what we read without much question or reflection.

In a recent article for The New Yorker, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several studies on the human mind's limitations of reason, starting with groundbreaking work at Stanford 50 years ago.

"Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can't think straight was shocking," Kolbert writes. "It isn't any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding."

What Causes the Logic Breakdown?

There are a number of ways in which reason fails us, leaving us vulnerable to factually incorrect news stories that spread like viruses and infect understanding of what's real and what's not. One of the relevant psychological concepts is "motivated reasoning," writes Adam Waytz, an associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern's Kellogg School.

Motivated reasoning is the idea that we are motivated to believe whatever confirms our opinions.

"If you're motivated to believe negative things about Hillary Clinton [or Donald Trump], you're more likely to trust outrageous stories about her that might not be true," Waytz says. "Over time, motivated reasoning can lead to a false social consensus."

Another related concept is "naïve realism," or the idea that our views are the only ones that are accurate. Such a notion contributes to polarization in political discussions; instead of disagreeing with people, Waytz says, we often dismiss their views as incorrect.

"We're all quick to believe what we're motivated to believe, and we call too many things 'fake news' simply because it doesn't support our own view of reality," he notes.

Sloman's research focuses on the idea that knowledge is contagious. Hence his book title: The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.

Sloman recently published a paper called "Your Understanding Is My Understanding" in the journal Psychological Science with Brown undergraduate Nathaniel Rabb. In the web-based experiment, which examined more than 700 volunteers, Brown and Rabb made up a phenomena in which scientists supposedly discovered a system of helium rain.

In one situation, they told the volunteers that the scientists do not fully understand the phenomena and cannot fully explain it, before asking the volunteers to rate their own understanding of helium rain on a scale of one to seven, with one being the lowest. Most of the volunteers rated their answers at one, admitting they don't understand the concept.

However, in the second instance, Sloman and his partner told the volunteers that the scientists understand helium rain and can fully explain how it works. When asked to rate their own understanding, this group of volunteers submitted answers that averaged around two. The fact that the scientists understand gave the volunteers an increased sense of understanding, Sloman says.

The idea can easily be translated into politics.

"It's like understanding is contagious," Sloman says. "If everyone around you is saying they understand why a politician is crooked, they saw a video [about that person] on YouTube...then you're going to start thinking that you understand, too."

How to Fight Fakeness

With all this research shedding light on what makes us so susceptible to fake news, is there a way we can protect ourselves against it?

"I don't think it's possible to train individuals to verify everything that they encounter," Sloman says. "It is just too human to believe what you're told and move on."

However, Sloman says he sees the potential in training a community to care about verification. Think of the headlines and stories that are shared on your Facebook feed every day that, most likely, align with your world view. We as a community should consider lowering the bar on what should be double-checked, Sloman says.

All it takes is one person to comment that something doesn't add up.

"Develop a norm in your community that says, 'We should check things and not just take them at face value,'" Sloman says. "Verify before you believe."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How many animals of each kind did Moses put on the ark? If you answered two, then congratulations: You're wrong. It wasn't Moses who put animals on the ark; it was Noah. As science has it, this question and others like it illustrate more than just a person's general confusion between two historic religious figures.

# data[].attributes.headline
Facebook, Google Can't Solve Fake News Problem Alone | Fortune.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Facebook, Google Can't Solve Fake News Problem Alone | Fortune.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Here's Why Facebook and Google Can't Fix the Fake News Problem

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fake news has more to do with human nature than it does technology, researcher danah boyd argues.

# data[].attributes.headline
Fake news is shared as widely as the real thing

# data[].attributes.subject
Fake news is shared as widely as the real thing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Become an FT Subscriber.

Keep abreast of significant corporate, financial and political developments around the world. Stay informed and spot emerging risks and opportunities with independent global reporting, expert commentary and analysis you can trust.

Choose the subscription that is right for you

For 4 weeks receive unlimited Premium digital access to the FT's trusted, award-winning business news

MyFT - track the topics most important to you

FT Weekend - full access to the weekend content

Mobile & Tablet Apps - download to read on the go

Gift Article - share up to 10 articles a month with family, friends and colleagues

All the benefits of Standard plus:

Lex - our agenda setting daily column

In-depth analysis - on trade, emerging markets, M&A, investing and more

ePaper - a digital replica of the newspaper

Gift Article - share up to 20 articles a month with family, friends and colleagues

All the benefits of Premium plus:

The FT delivered to your home or office Monday to Saturday, including the FT Weekend paper and supplements

Learn more and compare subscriptions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Become an FT Subscriber. Keep abreast of significant corporate, financial and political developments around the world. Stay informed and spot emerging risks and opportunities with independent global reporting, expert commentary and analysis you can trust.

# data[].attributes.headline
Facebook cracks down on 'fake news' ahead of NZ election | Radio New Zealand News

# data[].attributes.subject
Facebook cracks down on 'fake news' ahead of NZ election | Radio New Zealand News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Facebook is briefing political parties and media in New Zealand ahead of the election as part of its efforts to crack down on "fake news".

The social networking website released a report late last week which acknowledged it had been used by governments and other agents seeking to manipulate public opinion.

It outlined efforts to crack down on false accounts which create and spread misinformation.

Before the report's release, Facebook's director of policy for New Zealand, Mia Garlick, spoke to RNZ about what it had planned here.

She would not comment on whether "fake news" was a specific problem in New Zealand, saying she would "leave that to the experts".

But she said New Zealanders had many trustworthy news sources and the country's political eco-system was "operating at best practice".

"I think it's going to be a really healthy and vibrant debate in the lead-up to the election."

Facebook had begun engaging with politicians and media organisations to help them understand the tools available to them, she said.

"Through our outreach ... we can make sure that people understand and can get lots of exposure to verified content."

Facebook's verification was one example, she said.

Public figures, media companies and brands can apply to have a "blue tick" put beside their name, confirming them as an authentic account.

Ms Garlick said the company had also taken measures to "automatically detect and reduce the distribution of false news stories".

In the United States and across Europe, Facebook has begun rolling out a feature that assigns a "disputed" tag on questionable news stories.

It was working with fact-checking organisations and media outlets to review stories that had been flagged by users.

Ms Garlick said that was still in a trial phase and it was too early to reveal whether Facebook had anything similar planned here.

New Zealanders could already report questionable content by clicking on the small arrow on the top right corner of links.

Facebook's recent crackdown on fake news is a stark change in position from November last year.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg then rejected the notion that fake stories on Facebook could have influenced the US presidential election as a "pretty crazy idea".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Facebook cracks down on 'fake news' ahead of NZ election

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Facebook is briefing political parties and media in New Zealand ahead of the election as part of its efforts to crack down on "fake news". The social networking website released a report late last week which acknowledged it had been used by governments and other agents seeking to manipulate public opinion.

# data[].attributes.headline
Fake news: is media literacy the answer? | David Buckingham

# data[].attributes.subject
Fake news: is media literacy the answer? | David Buckingham

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Growing concerns about 'fake news' have led to calls for young people to be taught critical media literacy skills. Yet while media literacy would obviously be useful, it isn't enough to address the problem. Media educators need to frame the issue more broadly, and join forces with those calling for media reform.
In the wake of the election of Donald Trump, there has been considerable debate about the problem of so-called 'fake news'. Trump's opponents have accused his supporters - including the Russian government - of circulating fabricated news stories in order to gain support. Yet Trump himself has frequently used the term to discredit what he claims is false information about him.

The problem is somewhat less evident here in the UK, although the Brexit campaign and the attempts to unseat Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader have raised similar issues about media bias and misrepresentation. There may have been fewer outright lies, but there have been plenty of examples of the media - and, of course, of politicians themselves - manipulating the truth.

Back in 1710, the satirist Jonathan Swift noted that 'falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.' 'Fake news' has always been with us. Yet developments in technology, and in the wider media landscape, are undoubtedly making it a more urgent problem.

The dangers of fake news are fairly self-evident. The democratic political process depends upon the circulation of reliable information. If information can no longer be trusted, citizens have little basis on which to make political decisions. As such, there is now high-level concern about fake news among governments around the world. Barack Obama has gone so far as to describe it as a threat to democracy.

In the US in particular, there has been an interesting debate about the potential of media literacy education in this respect. Some difficult issues are at stake here - about trust and credibility, about epistemology (what's fake? what's truth?), about the role of educators, and about public knowledge more broadly.

These are not new issues for media educators. Media Studies teaching (at least in the UK) has always addressed questions about news bias and representation - to the point where it almost seems like an old-fashioned concern. The advent of the internet raised new questions about credibility, and about the need for information literacy: yet these have also been on the agenda for educators for many years.

Nor are these issues confined to new media. They also apply to 'old' media, and to the behaviour of politicians themselves. Politicians have always made false claims, and indeed told blatant lies - although the success of people like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson would suggest that they are increasingly able to get away with it.

Yet while these may be well-established phenomena, they are taking on a new form in the digital age. Social media has made it much easier for lies and misinformation to be circulated from person to person, bypassing the gatekeepers and regulators who controlled old media. So what is the role of media literacy education in what some are calling this 'post-truth' era?
What is fake news?
Most simply, fake news is news that is fabricated, and deliberately intended to mislead or deceive. As such, it's important to distinguish it from satirical parodies of news (sites such as The Onion in the US) - although some readers may not always appreciate this distinction. Fake news typically appears on sites that masquerade as genuine news sites, although it is often picked up and re-circulated by mainstream media.

Fake news often has a political dimension: it is intended as a form of misinformation or propaganda that is designed to exert political influence. It may even constitute a form of 'cyberwarfare' between nations (although again, the history of the Cold War suggests that such activities are far from new).

However, in some cases, it may have a primarily economic motivation. Fake news often functions as 'clickbait', which will generate revenue thorough advertising and the selling of user data. Networking services - and in particular Facebook - will do most of this work for you: their entire business model depends upon it. As such, the fake news phenomenon needs to be understood in relation to the wider political economy of the internet.

These political and economic motivations may also be blurred. Although the Russian government may have been involved, much of the pro-Trump fake news generated during the 2016 election campaign apparently came from a cluster of sites run by teenagers in the Macedonian town of Veles. These entrepreneurial young people claimed that they were making easy money simply giving Trump supporters what they wanted to hear.

There are now so many examples of fake news stories - Wikipedia has an interesting list - that it is bound to become harder to identify them, or to tell fake from true. Of course, many are blatantly and obviously absurd. Perhaps my favourite example was the spoof story about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un being voted the sexiest man alive. The story was posted on the US satirical site The Onion in 2012, but it was taken up by the official newspaper the China People's Daily, which featured a 55-page photo spread on its website.

However, there are limits to such absurdity. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, the so-called 'Pizzagate' story made ludicrous claims that Hillary Clinton was involved in a paedophile sex trafficking ring run out of a Washington restaurant. Yet the laughter turned sour when a Trump supporter turned up at the pizza parlour firing an automatic weapon.

While there is little doubt that fake news was used extensively in support of Trump's campaign, and is particularly driven by the political right, the charge runs across the political spectrum. Return of Kings is just one extreme right-wing site that identifies 'fake news' purportedly circulated by so-called liberal media. Trump's latest claim that the US Intelligence Services have been circulating fake news about his exploits in Russian hotel rooms is a further example. It may have already happened, but in the near future we are bound to see fake news stories about fake news.

In some ways, the debate about fake news can be seen as a further deflation of the bubble of internet hype - especially the idea that networked technology would lead to a flowering of civic participation and democratic engagement. While some of us were sceptical about such claims from the outset, others - including early technology enthusiasts such as Timothy Wu and Wired magazine - have taken a little longer to get there.

While such technology might well be a great resource for progressive political activists, our research showed that it is also a valuable tool for anti-democratic forces, including the resurgent extreme right and those who peddle racism and other forms of abuse. The so-called 'alt-right' can also play the game of creating memes, optimizing search engines, trolling and tagging and going viral. Indeed, present evidence would suggest that they are much better at these things than those on the political left.
Technical solutions
Potentially, there are various ways of dealing with the problem of fake news. As with other problematic aspects of online content, such as pornography, some have called for a system of labeling. Sites might be encouraged - or even required - to obtain some kind of official certificate of approval from fact-checkers. 'White lists' of trustworthy sites might be established, or repeat offenders warned and then taken down by internet service providers.

Such responses would clearly require collaboration on the part of the technology companies. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg initially denied that his company had anything to do with the spread of fake news, although he has subsequently backtracked a little. Facebook has undertaken to block advertising by self-evidently fraudulent sites, and Google has claimed it will do this via its Adsense service. Facebook has also partnered with fact-checking websites on an initiative that will tag articles whose veracity is 'disputed'.

However, any further steps along these lines seem unlikely. Such actions would imply that these companies are not merely technology companies, but media companies - and this is something they are very keen to avoid. Requiring them to take responsibility for content would completely undermine their basic economic model, which is premised on the claim that they are simply technological services that users are free to use in any way they choose.
Media literacy
With governments unlikely or unwilling to challenge this free-market argument, commentators often look to media literacy education as some kind of alternative solution. For example, when a recent study by researchers at Stanford University found that most young people were unable to distinguish between real and fake news, there were calls for them to be taught 'internet literacy'. (It's not clear why this argument applied only to young people, but we can let that pass...). The influential website Vice, for example, ran the headline: 'we need to teach kids how to be skeptical of the internet'.

Most media literacy educators are likely to respond to this with a degree of weariness. Duh! Isn't that what we've been trying to do for decades - despite fact that we have been consistently marginalized within the mainstream curriculum?

Yet there is a broader problem here. Media literacy is often invoked in a spirit of 'solutionism'. When media regulation seems impossible, media literacy is often seen as the acceptable answer - and indeed a magical panacea - for all media-related social and psychological ills. Are you worried about violence, sexualisation, obesity, drugs, consumerism? Media literacy is the answer! Let the teachers deal with it!

This argument clearly frames media literacy as a protectionist enterprise, a kind of prophylactic. It oversimplifies the problems it purports to address, overstates the influence of media on young people, and underestimates the complexity of media education. Thus, violence in society is not simply caused by media violence, and it will not be reduced by simply telling kids that movies are teaching them the wrong lessons - or indeed by stopping them watching TV, as some propose.

Similar arguments apply to fake news. Fake news is a symptom of much broader tendencies in the worlds of politics and media. People (and not just children) may be inclined to believe it for quite complex reasons. And we can't stop them believing it just by encouraging them to check the facts, or think rationally about the issues.

Of course, this is not to say we shouldn't try. The US media educator Frank Baker has assiduously gathered a set of checklists and recommendations for educators trying to tackle fake news in the classroom. Students are encouraged to cross-check online information, to verify and compare sources, to analyse the design and construction of sites, to check the provenance of the material, and to think about the producers' motivations. There are several lesson plans and videos on Frank's site, many of them undoubtedly useful.

However, there has also been some debate about the role of media literacy here. Microsoft's Danah Boyd has claimed that, far from being any kind of solution, media literacy might actually be the cause of the fake news problem - a strange and muddled argument that has understandably exasperated practitioners.

However, there have been some other contributions that point to the need for a broader view. They argue that fake news is merely a manifestation of much broader problems, that apply to 'real' news as well; and that while media literacy is obviously important to pursue, it might not prove to be a sufficient solution. So what are the problems here?
Problems with media literacy
Firstly, there are some significant pedagogical problems in how we might deal with fake news in the classroom. Assessing the reliability and credibility of sources is arguably much more difficult with online media than used to be the case with 'old' media, although this is something that experienced media educators can probably handle. However, in this case, judging truth and falsehood must depend to some extent on knowing about content as well as form - understanding the topics at hand, rather than just how they are presented. This is particularly hard in a context where most of one's students are unlikely to be interested in political or social issues, let alone knowledgeable about them (although again, this applies to adults just as much as young people).

Even if these critical skills can be cultivated, there is a further question about how far they will actually be applied outside the classroom. How many people are willing to routinely evaluate the reliability of online sources, or to cross-check information - especially in an age when we have become used to instant access to information? Personally, I am sorry to say that I rarely do this, and I doubt that I could persuade an average sixteen-year-old student to do so either.

Beyond this, there is the problem of epistemology. You don't have to be a complete relativist to acknowledge that a given 'fact' can be interpreted in many different ways by different people in different contexts. There are some absolute truths and some absolute falsehoods, but between them lies a very large grey area.

And interpretation is a complicated business. As Maha Bali has pointed out, 'real' news often requires a great deal of critical and emotional energy to deal with. As such, discerning true from false - or, rather, identifying and coming to terms with the elements of truth and falsehood in most representations of the world - may only be the beginning of a much more complex educational journey.

There's a danger here of assuming that we are dealing with a rational process - or at least one that can, by some pedagogical means, be made rational. But from an educational perspective, we surely have to begin with the question of why people might believe apparently 'fake' news in the first place. By no means all media use is rational. Where we decide to place our trust is as much to do with fantasy, emotion and desire, as with rational calculation. All of us are inclined to believe what we want to believe.

This is arguably much more complex at time when we can exercise much greater control over the media and sources to which we are exposed. In terms of digital media, this has led to growing concerns about the 'filter bubble', or the 'echo chamber effect'. We can easily filter out things we dislike or do not agree with, and thereby remain in a comfortable world where everything appears to confirm our existing world-view. Research suggests that people positively want to remain in such filter bubbles - and, more generally, that news that plays to already-established positions or prejudices is much more inclined to be 'liked' (and hence to generate more income for social media companies). While this is partly a consequence of the proliferation and fragmentation of media, it is also a symptom of growing political polarization, and of diminishing trust in authority much more broadly.

False beliefs may derive from exposure to fake news, or be simply reconfirmed by it. But either way, it seems unlikely that they will be easily dispelled by a good dose of facts, or the force of rational argument. The history of media education certainly tells us this. Racism, for example, is unlikely to be dispelled by appeals to rationality, or by critically analyzing racism in the media. Indeed, it often proves extremely resistant to such teacherly strategies.

There is a further danger here, which media literacy education can easily play into. A critical perspective can easily slide into a generalized, superficial cynicism - a blanket distrust of everything and everyone, and especially of the media. This might appear nihilistic, but it is also quite a comforting position to adopt; and it is a stance that unites conspiracy theorists of all political persuasions.

Ultimately, media literacy is an individualistic solution. Policy makers accept, however regretfully, that the media are not doing a good job in informing citizens and promoting democracy, and that regulating them is impossible. And so they pass responsibility down to the individual consumer: it's their problem to sort it out.

I have argued elsewhere that this approach informs many governmental endorsements of media literacy, and the work of regulatory bodies: it is key to understanding the history of media literacy policy in the UK, for example. While it appears to be about empowering consumers, it effectively absolves governments of responsibility for addressing problems that arise in a media landscape that is increasingly driven by the imperatives of the free market.

I am not arguing that media literacy is not the answer - or at least an answer - but simply that it is not enough on its own. Media literacy needs to be linked to wider campaigns for media reform. This is partly about professional practices. As Charlie Beckett has argued, there is now a growing need for professional journalists to be more sceptical, and more explicit, in their use of evidence, and more transparent themselves. Especially in the era of President Trump, mainstream journalism has a much greater responsibility to perform its traditional role of 'speaking truth to power'.

However, there is a broader challenge posed by the 'non-professional' journalism of social media. As Evgeny Morozov argues, fake news ultimately exists because of the business model of what he calls 'digital capitalism': it exists because it's profitable. If we want to challenge fake news, we have to challenge the enormous power of digital advertising and the global companies that thrive on it.

Like Paul Mason, Morozov calls for better government regulation, and ultimately for the break-up of the big data companies. This might seem an unlikely outcome, perhaps. But surely understanding this bigger picture is what critical media literacy education should be all about...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fake news: is media literacy the answer?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Growing concerns about 'fake news' have led to calls for young people to be taught critical media literacy skills. Yet while media literacy would obviously be useful, it isn't enough to address the problem. Media educators need to frame the issue more broadly, and join forces with those calling for media reform.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Council's adjudications are based on ethical considerations: it does not recover debts or seek monetary recompense for complainants. Its Principles and Complaints Procedures are set out below.

# data[].attributes.headline
Filters, bait and plain fake: Today's news . #smcakl . social media club auckland

# data[].attributes.subject
Filters, bait and plain fake: Today's news . #smcakl . social media club auckland

# data[].attributes.headline
Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Noam Chomsky: The five filters of the mass media machine | The Listening Post

# data[].attributes.headline
5 Animations Introduce the Media Theory of Noam Chomsky, Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stuart Hall | Open Culture

# data[].attributes.subject
5 Animations Introduce the Media Theory of Noam Chomsky, Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stuart Hall | Open Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We watch it happen in real time, aghast as the media cannibalizes itself, turning reality into a parody of the kind we laughed at in goofy dystopian scenarios from Back to the Future, The Simpsons, Idiocracy. A brave new world of hypercredulity and monstrous disingenuousness arrived on our smart phones and TVs. It was gaudy and pernicious and lied to us like we couldn't trust our lying eyes. We saw reality TV mainlined into reality. The response was to shout, "Fake News," a phrase almost immediately redigested and spun into flimsy conspiracy theories. It now serves little purpose but to get the snake gnawing its tail again.

How?, many wondered in despair. Haven't people read the theory? Noam Chomsky, Marshall McLuhan, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Roland Barthes.... Didn't we see them proven right time and again? But chances are if you know all these names, you've spent time in university English, Communications, or Media Studies departments.

You've hung around hip bookstores and coffeeshops in cities and puzzled over critical theory, pretending, perhaps, to have read at least one of these writers you hadn't. You gave up your TV years ago and kept your kids away from screens (or told people you did). You fit, in other words, a certain profile, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it was, in the scheme of things, a pretty narrow niche, and an often pretty smug one at that.

Maybe academics, critics, and journalists need to be better at talking and listening to ordinary people? Maybe fashionable waves of anti-intellectualism need to be resisted with almost religious vigor...? Whatever the solution(s) for mass media illiteracy, we can treat the video series here from Al Jazeera as a step in the right direction. Called " Media Theorized: Reading Against the Grain," the project takes as its subtitle a quote from Roland Barthes, the French philosopher and literary critic who distilled cultural studies into highly readable essays, dissecting everything from wrestling to tourism to advertising. Barthes showed how these genres constitute symbolic texts, just like romantic novels and morality plays, but purport to show us unmediated truth.

"Media Theorized" surveys five cultural critics who have, in five different ways, made similar analyses of mass media. Marshall McLuhan famously declared the medium as the message: its signal inseparable from its noise; Noam Chomsky demonstrated how popular consent is engineered by a narrow set of shady special interests with influence over the media; Stuart Hall showed how mass media manipulates discourses of race, class, gender, and religion to misrepresent outsiders and marginalized people and keep them in their place in the social imaginary; and Edward Said documented the long tradition of "Orientalism"---a totalizing Euro-American discourse that estranges, belittles, and dehumanizes whole countries, cultures, and religious communities.

While it's impossible to do justice to the richness and depth of their arguments with quick summaries and pithy animation, what "Media Theorized" does well is to present this handful of academics as accessible and uniquely relevant to our current situation. This works especially well because the presenters are people used to putting theory into practice, communicating with the public, and critiquing mass media. Activists and journalists from all over the world, who have not only contributed short videos on YouTube, but thoughtful supplementary essays and interviews at the "Media Theorized" site (which also includes high resolution posters from each video.) The project is an invitation for each of us to take several steps back and ask some highly pertinent questions about how and why the stories we're told get told, and for whose benefit.

Millions of people have had enough and are demanding accountability from individual figures in the media---a positive development, to be sure, though it seems like too little too late. We need to understand the damage that's been done, and continues to be done, by the systems mass media enable and sell. This series introduces "critical tools" we can use in our "everyday encounters" with such salesmanship.
Related Content: Marshall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buckminster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Modern Technology & Media (1971) An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard Predicts the Rise of Social Media (1977) is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
5 Animations Introduce the Media Theory of Noam Chomsky, Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stuart Hall

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Back to the Future, The Simpsons, Idiocracy. A brave new world of hypercredulity and monstrous disingenuousness arrived on our smart phones and TVs. It was gaudy and pernicious and lied to us like we couldn't trust our lying eyes. We saw reality TV mainlined into reality.

# data[].attributes.headline
Edward Bernays - Father of Modern Propaganda / Public Relations - Abby Martin w/ Mark Crispin Miller - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Edward Bernays - Father of Modern Propaganda / Public Relations - Abby Martin w/ Mark Crispin Miller - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Edward Bernays - Father of Modern Propaganda / Public Relations - Abby Martin w/ Mark Crispin Miller

# data[].attributes.headline
Advertising and Propaganda Techniques - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Advertising and Propaganda Techniques - YouTube

# data[].attributes.headline
We Have Ways of Making You Think - Goebbels Master of Propaganda - BBC Documentary 1992 - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
We Have Ways of Making You Think - Goebbels Master of Propaganda - BBC Documentary 1992 - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We Have Ways of Making You Think - Goebbels Master of Propaganda - BBC Documentary 1992

# data[].attributes.headline
Why every social media site is a dumpster fire - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Why every social media site is a dumpster fire - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why every social media site is a dumpster fire

# data[].attributes.headline
Why obvious lies make great propaganda - YouTube

# data[].attributes.subject
Why obvious lies make great propaganda - YouTube

# data[].attributes.body
Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think - Issue 69: Patterns - Nautilus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I can't see them. Therefore they're not real." From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged on Sunday from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, who was referring to ... germs. The former Princeton University undergraduate and Afghanistan counterinsurgency instructor said, to the mirth of his co-hosts, that he hadn't washed his hands in a decade. Naturally this germ of misinformation went viral on social media.

The next day, as serendipity would have it, the authors of The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread-philosophers of science Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall-sat down with Nautilus. In their book, O'Connor and Weatherall, both professors at the University of California, Irvine, illustrate mathematical models of how information spreads-and how consensus on truth or falsity manages or fails to take hold-in society, but particularly in social networks of scientists. The coathors argue "we cannot understand changes in our political situation by focusing only on individuals. We also need to understand how our networks of social interaction have changed, and why those changes have affected our ability, as a group, to form reliable beliefs."

O'Connor and Weatherall, who are married, are deft communicators of complex ideas. Our conversation ranged from the tobacco industry's wiles to social media's complicity in bad data. We discussed how science is subtly manipulated and how the public should make sense of contradictory studies. The science philosophers also had a sharp tip or two for science journalists.

Fact Checkers: "We're philosophers of science and felt the manipulation of science is immediately relevant to our culture and really should be understood," says James Weatherall (right), about why he and Cailin O'Connor (left) wrote The Misinformation Age.

What do you think of a commentator on a TV show with an audience of about 1.5. million people saying germs aren't real?
Cailin O'Connor: [laughs] We disagree!

James Weatherall: We're against it.

O'Connor: In fact, there's a long history of people having wacky false beliefs. People believed there were animal-plant hybrids-and these were naturalists. People believe all sorts of crazy things about the human body. If you understand beliefs in this social perspective, where people are passing them from person to person, and we have to trust each other and can't verify things for ourselves, it's not unexpected that we would have some wacky beliefs. But I don't know about a person who says germs aren't real in this day and age!

Weatherall: This is a perfect example of what we're talking about. Acting as if germs don't exist is going to lead to a lot of bad outcomes. You're going to get sicker. You're not going to treat surgical sites the right way. But it's also something where you can't really check yourself. Most of us don't have microscopes to see germs. It's the same with climate change. You can freely go around saying either the climate isn't changing or that anthropogenic sources had nothing to do with it. Without getting any immediate feedback, without anything going wrong in your life, you can form these kinds of beliefs.
What inspired two philosophers of science to wade into misinformation?
O'Connor: I've been worried about climate change since I was 5 years old, and here we are 30 years later and still not doing anything about it. This is absolutely insane. It's clear the marketplace of ideas isn't working. We've allowed ourselves to be influenced by big oil and gas for over 30 years. But it was the 2016 election that prompted us. We just started writing it right after the election. We just sat down and said, What can we do, given our research skills, to improve this public crisis about false belief?
When it comes to misinformation, twas always thus. What's changed now?
O'Connor: It's always been the case that humans have been dependent on social ties to gain knowledge and belief. There's been misinformation and propaganda for hundreds of years. If you're a governing body, you have interests you're trying to protect. You want to control what people believe. What's changed is social media and the structure of communication between people. Now people have tremendous ability to shape who they interact with. Say you're an anti-vaxxer. You find people online who are also anti-vaxxers and communicate with them rather than people who challenge your beliefs.

The other important thing is that this new structure means that all sorts of influencers-the Russian government, various industry groups, other government groups-have direct access to people. They can communicate with people in a much more personal way. They can pose on Twitter and Facebook as a normal person who you might want to interact with. If you look at Facebook in the lead up to the 2016 election, the Russian Internet Research Agency created animal-lovers groups, Black Lives Matter groups, gun-rights groups, and anti-immigrant groups. They could build trust with people who would naturally be part of these groups. And once they grounded that trust, they could influence them by getting them not to vote or by driving polarization, causing more extreme rhetoric. They can make other people trust them in ways that would have been very difficult without social media.

It's not fraudulent. They haven't done anything wrong. But it's misdirection.

Weatherall: People tend to trust their friends, their family, people who they share other affinities with. So if the message can look like it's coming from those people, it can be very effective. Another thing that's become widespread is the ability to produce easily shareable visual media. The memes we see on Twitter or on Facebook don't really say anything, they conjure up an emotion-an emotion associated with an ideology or belief you might have. It's a type of misinformation that supports your beliefs without ever coming out and saying something false or saying anything.

How does misinformation spread through science?
Weatherall: The philosopher of science, Bennett Holman, argues that the right way of thinking about the relationship between industry and science is as an arms race where you develop a new sort of epistemic standard. Do you want to get a drug approved? It's got to be a randomized clinical trial. Previously there were lower standards for what sorts of evidence were needed to demonstrate the efficacy and safety of the drug. But as scientists and regulators come up with new standards for dealing with possible misuse of evidence, groups who want to influence public belief or public policy come up with more sophisticated ways of getting around those.
What's a good example of an industry using sophisticated techniques to manipulate science?
Weatherall: In the 1960s, the scientific consensus had become clear that there was a link between tobacco products and cancer. The tobacco industry recognized a number of things very quickly. One, this was almost certainly true-their own scientists were getting the same results. Two, it was disastrous for them. Three, they were not going to be able to come up with a compelling evidence-based argument that tobacco was safe or beneficial. But they realized they didn't need to. All they needed to do was emphasize the uncertainty present in any kind of scientific endeavor. They made the case the evidence isn't in yet and it's rash to act. It's too soon for individuals to give up smoking. It's too soon for the government to intervene.

O'Connor: There's this naive view that they pay off scientists and scientists start saying tobacco is safe. In fact, they have all these subtle and insidious methods that are not fraudulent and don't subvert the norms of science. In the tobacco case, they went out and found all the studies where mice painted with tobacco tar didn't get cancer. There were a bunch of those studies done by independent scientists. The industry then shares all those. That's not fraudulent. They haven't done anything wrong. But it's misdirection.

Weatherall: The tobacco industry also funded good research into mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos. They did this because they wanted to go into court and say, "Yes, these people have lung cancer, but there are other environmental factors besides cigarettes that could explain the rise of lung cancer over this period."

O'Connor: Bennett Holman and Justin Bruner give a great example of heart arrhythmias. When people were first studying anti-arrhythmic drugs, the question was, "Are these going to reduce heart attacks?" Other scientists asked, "Do they reduce arrhythmia?" Big Pharma funded the latter group. It poured money into scientists asking whether these drugs reduced arrhythmia. In fact, they did. But they also increased heart attacks and were responsible for upward of 100,000 premature deaths by heart attack. So, again, independent researchers were doing exactly what they were doing before. It was just that some of them now had a lot more money and that shaped the evidence.

Weatherall: Whenever there's an economic incentive to get people to believe something, you're going to find organizations doing their best to get out the evidence that supports their case. But they may not think of themselves as propagandists. They may simply be engaging in the kind of motivated reasoning that all of us engage in. They're finding the evidence that happens to support the beliefs they already have. They want whatever it is that they believe to be true. They don't want to feel like they're bad people. They're trying to get the best information out there.

O'Connor: Well, in some cases, they're more cynical than that.

Weatherall: In some cases, they're more cynical. I don't mean to say that they're all just fine. I just want to emphasize that it can be subtle.

O'Connor: One of the things we recognize, coming from this philosophical perspective, is scientists are humans. Scientists are people too. And of course scientists are fallible, and of course scientists have political and social beliefs. But that's normal. Everyone has to have some beliefs. The problem is industry has weaponized what's normal to their advantage. For example, an ex-manager of DuPont accused the scientists working on CFCs in the ozone hole of not being objective because they had political motives. Well, yes, they had a political motive to protect us from cosmic radiation. That was used against them but in no way undermined the actual evidence they were gathering.

Weatherall: Another thing weaponized along similar lines is the fact that scientists disagree. They ought to disagree. If they weren't criticizing one another, and disagreeing with one another, we wouldn't have the grounds to trust the results of science the way that we do. But in cases where it looks as if scientists are disagreeing, it's very easy for someone to say the jury is out, or the evidence isn't clear. What often happens is that debates in scientific literature, in peer-reviewed journals, get settled. But then the debate will move to the newspapers and get explored on op-ed pages. It might be written by a scientist who's doing the disagreeing. But there's an illegitimacy to that. It reflects not sincere differences between people who are treating the evidence in the same way. It reflects a person who is no longer producing work of a sort that can meaningfully convince their peers of anything. So now they're trying to convince people who are less equipped to evaluate it.

Fake news is shared more often by older people than by younger people.

So should the public be skeptical of scientists making their case in op-ed pages?
Public trust in science wavers because of competing studies. One day coffee is good for you, the next it's not. How should the public know what studies to trust?
O'Connor: Not necessarily. In a lot of cases, scientists communicate with the public, and that can be a really good thing. What the public should be skeptical of are scientists who seem to be trying to argue for things in op-ed pages that they're no longer able to publish in real journals. They should also be skeptical of scientists from some other field publishing an op-ed about a field they're not part of.

O'Connor: If you're a consumer, you should be looking for scientific articles that aren't a one-off but rather package a lot of data from various studies. This should be true for journalists, too. There's tremendous incentive to publish things that are surprising or novel because that's how you get likes and clicks. But standards shouldn't be about having popular articles about individual studies. Instead, when you're writing about a topic, it ought to include a combination of good studies that show the science has been progressing for a while. That will give a much less misleading picture of the science.

Weatherall: We should say the incentive to publish surprising or novel studies applies to scientists too. They're probably less interested in likes, but it's how you get citations.
You write cultural beliefs often shape the problems that scientists work on. What's a good example?
O'Connor: Right, there's a huge novelty bias. When you look at social media, people share fake news more because it's novel, exciting. They also share studies that fail to replicate much more than studies that do replicate, probably because these studies are more surprising, right? So, resisting findings that seem shocking, weird, or novel, is something that can maybe protect you from adopting a false scientific belief.

O'Connor: I teach a class on how gender values move into biology. In the 1970s, people did studies on the hormones of menopausal women, but they excluded from the study any women who worked outside the home. The assumption was they must have abnormal hormones if they were working outside the home. They must be "man-women" or something. So there you go. Cultural beliefs, which now seem kind of wacky, then seemed not so unreasonable, and influenced science.

Weatherall: In fact, there are cases where cultural beliefs affect whole communities of scientists over a long period of time. So it's interesting to reflect on how that changes. And it invariably changes because the community changes, and sometimes it changes just because old people die, and younger scientists come in and realize, "Hold on, why are we assuming this?" And they make their career by criticizing something that used to be widely held and show that it was wrong. In other cases, things change because the community of scientists diversifies. For instance, and tell me if this is wrong, Cailin, more women started working in a field.
What can scientists do to prevent their work from being propagandized?
O'Connor: That's true in many cases. There's a famous example in primatology. If you look at early science on primate social behavior, it's largely focused on the behaviors of male primates, especially aggression in social hierarchies. When women grad students started moving into the field, they focused on the behavior of female primates. That revolutionized the field of primate behavior because of the diversity.

O'Connor: That's really tricky because often a lot of it is out of their hands. So, once you produce something, now people can use it however they want. But what needs to happen is a big-scale change: Industry has to stop being able to choose who they fund. As long as they're able to control who they're funding, even if they don't corrupt the scientists, they can corrupt the science.
How should science be funded?

Cultural beliefs, which now seem kind of wacky, then seemed not so unreasonable, and influenced science.

There was a recent study of Wikipedia that showed the most accurate and high quality articles were produced by an ideologically heterogeneous, diverse set of editors and writers. Does that square with your findings?
O'Connor: Through the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry.

Weatherall: I think there's a case to be made for a tax on industries that would otherwise be contributing money to scientific research. They recognize the importance of science for their kinds of products. So you might ask that there be a way of taking the money they would be spending and redirecting it to an organization that was selecting who was getting funded independently.
What are the best tools for good information?
Weatherall: Yes, it's consistent with the idea that science is best understood as a process that benefits from diversity. There's another side to that, though. In a marketplace of ideas, which means a lot to us culturally, we think there's nothing morally problematic about having whatever opinions you have, and expressing those opinions or beliefs. We tend to think that's OK because true things are going to win out in time. In fact, they haven't. If someone is monopolizing information flow, and interfering with what kind of information gets out there, that's going to affect the efficiency of the marketplace of ideas. That's what influencers, propagandists, and industrial groups are doing. Ideas aren't spreading properly from one community to another. So we get enclaves. This is what polarization looks like-a failure of reliable beliefs to spread from one community into another community.

O'Connor: Because the marketplace of ideas doesn't work, we are often voting as if a matter of fact is true or not. We vote for someone who doesn't believe in climate change and then act as if climate change is not true. That vote doesn't change whether it's true, and that vote doesn't change whether we're going to face the consequences of climate change. So the problem here is that matters of fact shouldn't be settled by public vote. They should be settled by gathering evidence and using that evidence to feed into our best tools to figure out what's true based on it.
Isn't that a cop-out?
O'Connor: Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what's true.
How can democratic institutions avoid aggregating the beliefs of the large group?
Weatherall: I had a fascinating conversation with the policymakers in the European Union about their ability to engage critically with science. What they said was, Look, we agree that a certain kind of critical reasoning is essential to having true and reliable beliefs. Unfortunately, we're elected to represent particular groups and particular interests, and so we don't get to question certain assumptions because our constituents don't question those assumptions, and so wouldn't vote for us. We wouldn't be doing our representative job if we were questioning those assumptions.
How can we intervene in social networks to direct people toward truth and facts?
Weatherall: Yes, but let's look at our institutions. Look at the way that they're failing. I think we could still have democracy with institutions that are better engineered, that are developed in response to the ways in which our current institutions are failing. We have some states that have direct voting on referenda and ballot measures. We need to find democratic institutions that are sufficiently representative, that are responsive to citizens but aren't simply aggregating the opinions and beliefs of the large group.
Can systemic changes really overturn false beliefs?
O'Connor: The thing we suggest, though who knows how you implement this, is having people vote on the things they value. Say I value public safety. Or I value environmentalism. Or I value freedom from government intervention. So you're voting on the kinds of things you prefer to have in your society rather than voting on actual matters of fact. Then your government should be implementing your values to create a better society, given the things that you want, but using the best evidence and facts to do that.

O'Connor: All social media sites should be employing teams to fight active misinformation and disinformation. There should be teams who are constantly adapting to whatever the new sources of misinformation from Russia or industry are, and trying to fight them. On an individual level, it's more tricky. People just don't trust others who have different beliefs from them. But from a broader perspective, there are things that could be effective. A vaccine skeptic could find somebody who shares some other beliefs and sense of identity with them. Somebody who can say, Look, I understand why you feel afraid about vaccines or why you're skeptical about them. Here are ways in which I, too, am like you and I understand your skepticism. Given this ground of mistrust, here are the reasons why I changed my mind and you could, too.

O'Connor: Of course, we're always going to have some false beliefs because we're social learners. It's easy for false beliefs to propagate from person to person. But that doesn't mean we're always going to have the same degree of false belief. If you look at cultural evolution, we developed these cultural systems that help us do better with our brains. We've developed amazing learning systems that help little kids learn more effectively than in the past. We also can develop systems that allow us to do the best we can with the brains that we've got. It's not just that we should give up and we're hopeless. If we have some sort of regulations about what sorts of news people could publish, for example, we can protect ourselves from misinformation.

Weatherall: We can learn what sorts of things we can trust, what sorts of things are reliable. We have to hope that we're going to become more successful, more effective, or more sophisticated about responding to misinformation that's spread online. I think there's evidence that this is happening. Fake news is shared more often by older people than by younger people. Deliberate misinformation is shared much more often by older people. There are a lot of possible explanations for that. One has to do with sophistication in the media. Younger people are more native to media, they are better at navigating it well.

O'Connor: Younger people are more savvy about identifying fake news, able to look at different aspects of some website and say, Oh, this probably isn't real, and so are less likely to share it.

Brian Gallagher is the editor of Facts So Romantic, the Nautilus blog. Follow him on Twitter @brianga11agher.

Kevin Berger is Nautilus' editor in chief.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think - Issue 69: Patterns - Nautilus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I can't see them. Therefore they're not real." From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged on Sunday from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, who was referring to ... germs. The former Princeton University undergraduate and Afghanistan counterinsurgency instructor said, to the mirth of his co-hosts, that he hadn't washed his hands in a decade.

# data[].attributes.headline
How social media platforms enable politicians to undermine democracy - Vox

# data[].attributes.subject
How social media platforms enable politicians to undermine democracy - Vox

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the inauguration of Brazil's new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in early January, a crowd of his supporters began a surprising chant. They weren't cheering for Bolsonaro or his running mate or their party; instead, they were reciting the names of social media platforms.

"Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!" the crowd yelled. "WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp!"

They were crediting the platforms with their man's victory, and they aren't entirely wrong. During the campaign, a conservative pro-business interest groupfunded a massive disinformation campaign on WhatsApp (the popular messaging app owned by Facebook). False and damaging information about Bolsonaro's left-wing opponent, including fake news mocked up to look like neutral fact-checks, spread like wildfire in the runup to the October 8 vote. This deluge, according to one Brazilian expert, played a role in Bolsonaro's victory.

The glee Bolsonaro's supporters exhibited points to a troubling development, one familiar to many Americans: Social media, once seen as a profoundly democratic technology, is increasingly serving the needs of authoritarians and their allies.

Many observers have noted that entrenched authoritarian states, like Russia and China, have gotten very good at manipulating these platforms to marginalize domestic dissidents and destabilize democracies abroad. What's gotten less attention is how authoritarian factions inside democratic states - far-right politicians and parties that are at best indifferent to democratic norms - benefit from the nature of modern social media platforms.

Authoritarians of both sorts benefit from spreading falsehoods about their opponents, ginning up panics about minority groups, and undermining people's trust in the independent media. Both the 2016 US election and the 2018 Brazilian vote proved social media is a perfect tool for this kind of activity.

Social media can certainly help pro-democracy movements at times, but they overall give far-right parties and authoritarians an advantage. These platforms, once seen as democracy's ally, have increasingly become its enemy.

It is easier to spread misinformation on social media than to correct it, and easier to inflame social divisions than to mend them. The very nature of how we engage with Facebook and the rest now helps far-right, authoritarian factions weaken the foundations of democratic systems - and even give themselves an easier pathway to seizing power.

It seems we have to admit a somewhat uncomfortable truth: Social media, in the way that it's used now, is an authoritarian medium.

How the far right exploits social media

The Journal of Democracy is one of the premier academic venues for analyzing the current state of democratic politics. Its most recent issue features an essay from Ronald Deibert, a political scientist and director of the University of Toronto's tech-focused Citizen Lab, on the role of social media in modern politics. His conclusion is pretty grim.

"It seems undeniable," Deibert writes, "that social media must bear some of the blame for the descent into neo-fascism."

Ten years ago, Deibert's view - now widely shared among journalists and scholars - would have sounded absurd.

In 2009, Iranians rose up to protest against a rigged election, the so-called "Green Movement" using Facebook and YouTube clips of protests to spread their message globally. Two years later, the Arab Spring protests showed the true power of these mediums, as protest movements that made skillful use of social media for coordination and messaging toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.

At the time, the consensus among observers was that social media was, by its very nature, democratizing. Social media facilitates the swift spread of information, allowing citizens to easily get around government censors. Social media allows rapid communication among large groups of disparate people, giving citizen activists new tools for organizing actions. The spread of social media would necessarily weaken authoritarian states and strengthen democracies - or, at least, that's how the argument went.

There were some dissenters, like the acerbic writer Evgeny Morosov, but they were largely brushed aside in an Arab Spring-induced high. More representative was the 2013 issue of the MIT Technology Review titled " Big Data Will Save Politics," featuring an interview with the singer Bono declaring that new technologies would be "deadly to dictators."

This theory turned out to be partly true: It can be difficult to simply repress the spread of information on social media. But as we've come to discover, it's equally difficult to repress the spread of disinformation. The core feature of social media that gives it democratic promise, the rapid spread of information, can be used against democracy via information overload.

A savvy person or political party looking to discredit online critics doesn't need to ban their speech to hamstring it. Instead, they can respond with a deluge of false or misleading information, making it very hard for ordinary citizens to figure out what's actually going on.

Deibert's essay usefully summarizes a number of different studies documenting how well the twisted jiujitsu of misinformation and information overload works:

An always-on, real-time information tsunami creates the perfect environment for the spread of falsehoods, conspiracy theories, rumors, and "leaks." Unsubstantiated claims and narratives go viral while fact-checking efforts struggle to keep up. Members of the public, including researchers and investigative journalists, may not have the expertise, tools, or time to verify claims. By the time they do, the falsehoods may have already embedded themselves in the collective consciousness.

Meanwhile, fresh scandals or outlandish claims are continuously raining down on users, mixing fact with fiction. Worse yet, studies have found that attempts "to quash rumors through direct refutation may facilitate their diffusion by increasing fluency." In other words, efforts to correct falsehoods can ironically contribute to their further propagation and even acceptance. The constant bombardment of tainted leaks, conspiracy theories, and other misinformation in turn fuels cynicism, with citizens growing fatigued as they try to discern objective truth amid the flood of news. Questioning the integrity of all media - one aim of authoritarianism - can in turn lead to a kind of fatalism and policy paralysis.

The WhatsApp propaganda in Brazil is one example of the effect Deibert is talking about. A well-funded campaign to spread false information was extremely difficult for Bolsonaro's opponents and Brazil's independent press to expose or discredit. The falsehoods these messages spread likely became truth in the eyes of a significant percentage of people who encountered them, many of whom would never see rebuttals and wouldn't believe them if they did.

Donald Trump and his allies in the more unscrupulous parts of the American conservative movement employ a similar strategy. The president lies, a lot; while the mainstream press debunks him, right-wing outlets spread those falsehoods or manufactured supporting evidence on social media, where they cement as fact in the eyes of the president's hardcore supporters.

A recent study found that conservatives were more than four times as likely to share fake news on Facebook as liberals. Another study, from researchers at the University of Oxford, found that conservative users were overwhelmingly more likely to spread "junk news" (defined as outlets that "deliberately publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information").

"On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters consumes the largest volume of junk news, and junk news is the largest proportion of news links they share," the Oxford researchers write. "Extreme hard right [Facebook] pages - distinct from Republican pages - share more junk news than all the other audiences put together."

We're seeing the same phenomenon beyond the US and Brazil. The Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte has cultivated an online fan base - even bringing popular social media influencers into the government - that's known for " patriotic trolling": sending hate messages to his critics and spreading smears about them. The Philippine news site Rappler has identified a network of more than 12 million pro-Duterte propaganda accounts on various platforms, reporting that led to a concerted smear campaign against the site from Duterte's fans. An #UnfollowRappler social media campaign cost the site tens of thousands of Facebook followers, a huge hit for an online publication that depends on clicks to stay profitable.

Social media isn't the only - or even the primary - reason far-right populists have been able to win elections. There are all sorts of more fundamental reasons, ranging from ethnic divisions to anxiety about crime to the weakness of the political opposition that these leaders have exploited in their rise to power. It would be absurd to blame technology for a phenomenon that has much deeper political roots.

But while the global challenge to democracy from within isn't social media's fault, the major platforms do seem to be making this crisis worse. The platforms by their nature allow far-right politicians to marginalize opponents, consolidate their base, and exacerbate the social divisions that helped them rise to power. It helps them act like authoritarians even inside the confines of a democratic political system.

"Social media [outlets] not only are compatible with authoritarianism; they may be one of the main reasons why authoritarian practices are now spreading worldwide," as Deibert puts it.

Why social media advantages the far right over democracies

But it's possible we need to go even further than Deibert and the studies he cites. It's not just that social media is happening to help spread authoritarian behavior as a matter of chance or circumstance. Rather, it's that the platforms by their very naturegive anti-democratic politicians a leg up over their opponents.

To understand why, it's worth dividing a politician's use of social media into two basic types: normal use and abuse. Normal use of social media is simply an online extension of typical democratic campaign tactics: paying for ads spreading your message or uploading a campaign video to YouTube. Abuse involves the deliberate spread of false information, attempts to undermine faith in established reality, trolling, and harassment.

Normal use of social media can be equally helpful to all politicians, far-right or otherwise. But the negative use of social media, as in the Trump and Bolsonaro campaigns, intrinsically advantages anti-democratic political factions over their opponents.

Now, spreading misinformation isn't necessarily a silver bullet for winning elections. It sure seems social media abuse helped Bolsonaro, but the extent is not quite clear. Studies conflict on whether fake news helped Trump win the 2016 election. A review from a group of leading interdisciplinary experts, published in the prestigious journal Science last March, found that there was not yet sufficient evidence to determine how effective abuses of social media are in shifting voting behavior. They could matter, and could even matter a lot; right now, we just don't know enough to say.

But the abuse of social media can have more subtly corrosive effects on a democracy. Authoritarians don't win solely by spreading their own message; they win by exploiting conditions under which citizens become either indifferent to democratic institutions or actively hostile to them. By working to increase political apathy and undermining trust in established institutions, far-right parties strengthen themselves at the expense of mainstream parties.

The abuse of social media can be used to inflame these tensions - in essence, providing oxygen to the underlying social trends that produced far-right authoritarians in the first place. When fake news is flying around, no matter who's spreading it, people lose faith in the trustworthiness of their social institutions or perhaps even in the very idea of truth in politics. The spread of that attitude disproportionately benefits authoritarian factions in elections and weakens democratic ones.

The University of Oxford's Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard put out a report last year on the political abuse of social media platforms in 48 countries. They argue that in each of these cases, the use of tools like fake news and trolling undermine the health of democratic regimes and benefit authoritarians.

"There is mounting evidence that social media are being used to manipulate and deceive the voting public - and to undermine democracies and degrade public life," they write. "Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike."

Social media disproportionately serves far-right politicians in another way: by helping them stoke social divisions.

Far-right parties demonize out-groups, whether racial minorities, immigrants, or even (in Duterte's case) drug users. Their arguments center on making these groups look scary and dangerous, and ginning up fear and hatred targeting them.

The ease with which rumors and false information can be spread on social media, and the intrinsic difficulty in debunking these ideas once they're out there, makes them ideal platforms to spread demagogic messages. You can abuse social media to demonize out-groups, but it's much harder to do so to improve their images with the public. A study in Germany found that, all other things being equal, areas with higher rates of Facebook use saw higher rates of hate crimes targeting immigrants.

Pro-democracy politicians are much less likely to benefit from these kinds of illiberal messages. Their core supporters are much more likely to hold basic democratic commitments to equality and freedom, and thus they will lose rather than win support by stoking prejudice. The more anger there is out there, the better off anti-democratic forces are.

A BuzzFeed analysis found that between 2012 and 2017, seven of the 10 most popular articles about German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Facebook were false. Merkel is widely seen as a champion of European liberal values and inclusiveness, one of the major bulwarks against the far-right tide on the continent. Three of the seven false articles in the BuzzFeed list were attacks on her immigration record, all focusing on making immigrants seem like threats to Germany and Merkel unreasonably sympathetic.

Social media appears to be better suited to dividing than uniting, at least when it comes to politics. The glut of information, impossible to sort through for the ordinary citizen, shakes people's understanding of the world and causes them to retreat back to their own biases. Social media, in the way it's used now, objectively favors authoritarians.

It's not all bad, is it?

Now, to be fair, there are places where the Arab Spring-era promise of social media hasn't been extinguished.

In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has all but stamped out the independent press, Facebook has been a useful tool for citizens who want to counter government propaganda. Citizens opposed to Turkey's elected authoritarian, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been able to effectively spread anti-Erdogan messages online.

Even in more traditional dictatorships, social media's democratic potential hasn't been entirely repressed. The Sudanese government was forced to block a number of platforms in early January in response to a burgeoning protest movement using social media to spread its message.

But all these examples show is that not every authoritarian populist, or even straight-up authoritarian, is good at handling social media. There's nothing about Hungarian Facebook that makes it more resistant to fake news than Brazilian Facebook. It's just that Bolsonaro and his supporters have done a better job at realizing social media's propaganda potential than Orbán and his camp.

It's best to think of the nature of social media as a medium that gives authoritarians an advantage, but not an insurmountable one. It can end up favoring pro-democracy forces, in certain situations and under the right conditions.

But if both sides are equally skilled, the authoritarians should have a leg up. The deluge of information on social media overwhelms current platforms' potential to spread important information.

Social media right now is functioning as a kind of parody of the classic "marketplace of ideas" mode of the public square. Instead of the best ideas winning out in free debate, there are so many bad ideas that the good ones simply get drowned out.

In August 2018, MIT Technology Review revisited its 2013 "Big Data Will Save Politics" cover, publishing a series of essays examining whether the technology had lived up to its promise. The overwhelming conclusion was that the magazine had been far too naive.

"Today," editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield writes, "technology feels as likely to destroy politics as to save it."

Correction: An earlier version of this piece misstated the last name of the of the MIT Technology Review's editor as Gideon Richfield; it is Gideon Lichfield.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Social media is rotting democracy from within

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At the inauguration of Brazil's new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in early January, a crowd of his supporters began a surprising chant. They weren't cheering for Bolsonaro or his running mate or their party; instead, they were reciting the names of social media platforms. "Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!" the crowd yelled.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On Sunday, far-right evangelical Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we've done.

Posted on October 28, 2018, at 6:35 p.m. ET

SÃO PAULO, Brazil - From the balcony of BuzzFeed's São Paulo office right now, you can hear screams of "Ele Não" echoing through the city's winding avenues. It's the same phrase I've seen graffitied all over the city this month. The same one I heard chanted from restaurants and bars all afternoon. It means "not him" - him being Bolsonaro. But his victory tonight isn't a surprise. He's just one more product of the strange new forces that dictate the very fabric of our lives.

It's been a decade since I first felt like something was changing about the way we interact with the internet. In 2010, as a young news intern for a now-defunct website called the Awl, one of the first pieces I ever pitched was an explainer about why 4chan trolls were trying to take the also now-defunct website Gawker off the internet via a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. It was a world I knew. I was a 19-year-old who spent most of my time doing what we now recognize as "shitposting." It was the beginning of an era where our old ideas about information, privacy, politics, and culture were beginning to warp.

I've followed that dark evolution of internet culture ever since. I've had the privilege - or deeply strange curse - to chase the growth of global political warfare around the world. In the last four years, I've been to 22 countries, six continents, and been on the ground for close to a dozen referendums and elections. I was in London for UK's nervous breakdown over Brexit, in Barcelona for Catalonia's failed attempts at a secession from Spain, in Sweden as neo-Nazis tried to march on the country's largest book fair. And now, I'm in Brazil. But this era of being surprised at what the internet can and will do to us is ending. The damage is done. I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that I'll probably spend the rest of my career covering the consequences.

In 2010, when I pitched the 4chan story, I was sitting on a dorm room futon, clacking out a pitch email from a busted laptop. But this new darkness lives almost exclusively on our smartphones and almost always involves exploiting an American company's platform. Roughly 70% of smartphone users have an Android phone; the remaining 30% are on Apple. There are 2 billion monthly active Facebook users, 2 billion monthly active YouTube users, and 1.5 billion monthly active WhatsApp users. And when it comes to digital media, Facebook and Google control almost 60% of the digital advertising market, with Amazon as a distant third.

The way the world is using their phones is almost completely dominated by a few Silicon Valley companies. The abuse that is happening is due to their inability to manage that responsibility. All of this has become so normalized in the three years since it first began to manifest that we just assume now that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter will exacerbate political and social instability. We expect they will be abused by ultranationalist trolls. We know they will be exploited by data firms. We wait for them to help launch the careers of populist leaders.

To be sure, populism, nationalism, and information warfare existed long before the internet. The arc of history doesn't always bend toward what I think of as progress. Societies regress. The difference now is that all of this is being hosted almost entirely by a handful of corporations. Why is an American company like Facebook placing ads in newspapers in countries like India, Italy, Mexico, and Brazil, explaining to local internet users how to look out for abuse and misinformation? Because our lives, societies, and governments have been tied to invisible feedback loops, online and off. And there's no clear way to untangle ourselves.

The worst part of all of this is that, in retrospect, there's no real big secret about how we got here.

It's 2013 and an ad appears on Russia social networks: "Internet operators wanted! Job at chic office in Olgino!!!, salary 25960 rubles per month. Task: posting comments at profile sites on the Internet, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks. Reports via screenshots." Those who answer the ad are placed in a basement in St. Petersburg and become the first iteration of Russia's now-infamous Internet Research Agency - or troll army.

It's 2014 and Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party have swept India's general election in a landslide. The election is seen as the country's first Facebook election. Modi becomes the second-most-liked politician on Facebook behind President Obama. The same wave of Hindu nationalism that Modi rose to power with begins to inspire "cow vigilantism" and lynchings across rural India.

A month later, the streets of Mandalay, Myanmar, are filling with people. A mob is forming around a tea shop owned by a Muslim man. A Facebook post accusing the shop owner of raping a Buddhist employee was shared by a local ultranationalist monk named Wirathu. Rioters begin torching cars and destroying shops. Eventually the President's Office has to block access to Facebook in an effort to curb the violence.

It's 2015 and 270,000 Facebook users are allowing a third-party Facebook app called "This Is Your Digital Life" to access not only their data, but the data of their friends, as well - about 87 million users. The data is collected and analyzed by British data firm Cambridge Analytica and used for a process called "behavioral microtargeting."

It's May 2016 and far-right candidate Rodrigo Duterte has just become the president of the Philippines. Facebook's role in the election is undeniable. Two months prior, the company declares the gun-toting former mayor the "undisputed king of Facebook conversations." A cast of far-right internet celebrities begin to create an ad hoc propaganda network around him.

A month later, it's one of those rare early summer sunny mornings in London and I'm unnerved by how quiet the city is. The night before, 52% of the UK voted to leave the European Union. We will eventually hear claims that a pro-Brexit campaign group called Leave.EU had been using Cambridge Analytica's microtargeting methods for months. Bots and trolls connected to Russia's Internet Research Agency have spent the last 48 hours posting more than 45,000 tweets about Brexit in an attempt to divide voters.

It's January 2017 and Donald Trump has just become the 45th president of the United States. At his inauguration, Trump promises "this American carnage stops right here and stops right now." The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will conclude that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an intelligence campaign meant to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process."

In April 2017, far-right politician Marine Le Pen is voted through the first round of the French presidential elections. Her opponent Emmanuel Macron was targeted by a "massive and coordinated" hacking attack several minutes before a preelection media blackout. I'm in Paris as the streets of Paris fill with huge plumes of tear gas. Balaclava-clad protesters chant "The whole world hates the police" and tear traffic bollards out of the sidewalk. A shopping cart full of Molotov cocktails emerges from the crowd of anti-fascists and is rammed into the line of riot police. One of my pant legs briefly catches fire after I'm hit with a Roman candle.

A month later, a group of far-right YouTubers is detained by Italian police after going live on Periscope from the Mediterranean Sea, where they were shooting flares at a refugee rescue ship called the Aquarius. They were using far-right communities on Reddit and 4chan to crowdfund the stunt, pushing a conspiracy theory that nongovernmental organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières aren't actually saving refugees at sea, but actually part of an illegal human trafficking operation. One of the YouTubers, Lauren Southern, texts me as I arrive in Catania, Italy, to interview them. She says they've already left the city. "There is a safety risk and the media caused this and they may seriously get a bunch of 20-year-olds killed," she writes.

In August, the "Unite the Right" rally, organized by white nationalists on chat application Discord, Reddit, and 4chan, tears its way through Charlottesville, Virginia. A white supremacist attending the rally named James Alex Fields Jr. drives a half mile down the road, ramming his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing an activist named Heather Heyer.

A month later, the Alternative for Germany party come in third in the general election, becoming the first far-right party to enter German parliament in half a century. In the final hours of the election, a Russian botnet begins promoting far-right propaganda on Twitter. The AFD was also working closely with a digital media firm linked to the Trump and Le Pen campaigns. I can feel drops of rain start to hit my face as riot police lock their shields, creating a barrier between 1,000 anti-fascists on the terrace outside of Berlin's Traffic Club in Alexanderplatz and members of AFD on the balcony above. I watch AFD members chomp cigars and clink cocktail glasses and shout anti-gay slurs at the crowd below.

A few days later, Julian Assange holds a video conference with Catalan students outside the University of Barcelona. He teaches them to use apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. They will use these apps to hold an illegal referendum on Catalan independence. Federal Spanish police will attack voters. In the days that follow the vote, far-right anti-independence protesters will Sieg heil and chant fascist songs as they march on the city. I will run through the spidery alleyways of Barcelona's old city, trying to get ahead of the crowd that's forming at Arc de Triomf. I will hang from a lamppost as the Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, tells a crowd of thousands of independentistas that there will be no immediate secession from Spain. Catalan politicians will be arrested. Puigdemont will flee to Belgium.

It's November 2017 and the streets of Warsaw fill with red flares, Polish flags, and anti-Semitic banners. A week later, I'm standing in the freezing cold on a hill bathed in the red light of the same kind of flares in a small town called Częstochowa as soccer hooligans have their local clubs blessed by a priest. They lock arms with white nationalists and neo-Nazis, chugging from bottles of whiskey, singing more racist songs. A few weeks after that, the Polish Senate will approve a proposal that would make it illegal to acknowledge Poland's role in the Holocaust.

It's February 2018 and I'm wearing two layers of thermal underwear, running through the hills of Pyeongchang, South Korea. I'm trying to get around the huge traffic jam leading toward the Olympic Stadium. The sun is setting when the opening ceremony starts. South Korea nationalists burn pictures of Kim Jong Un and fight with police officers. A woman stands on top of a small makeshift stage and beats a drum as the crowd shouts along in time. One of the protesters asks me to report that South Korea needs Donald Trump to bomb North Korea. They wave American flags and photos of his face and thank me for electing him.

It's March 2018 and it's snowing wet clumps of slush on an anti-fascist library that's been recently firebombed. I watch as volunteers sweep away what's left of the room. They tell me they're scared this is only the beginning of the political violence that's yet to come. They're right. A few days later, the antiestablishment Five Star Movement led by Luigi Di Maio wins the most number of seats in the Italian general election. Online, a massive far-right botnet is in full swing. The Five Star Movement will go on to form a coalition with Matteo Salvini's right-wing League party. Salvini, emboldened by the populist surge in support, will spend the summer blocking refugee rescue ships.

It's June 2018 and a British far-right influencer named Tommy Robinson is in jail after going live on Facebook outside Leeds Crown Court, violating British contempt of court laws. Hundreds of his supporters have gathered in Whitehall to support President Trump's UK visit and protest Robinson's arrest, revved up by breathless coverage from a Canadian far-right media outlet called the Rebel. Robinson's fans fight police, take over the Silver Cross pub, and scream racist slurs at the hundreds of anti-Trump counterprotesters surrounding them. They demand Robinson be freed. One of them asks why the media isn't covering them. I tell him I am with the media and I am covering him and he says he meant the BBC and calls me fake news.

A month later, I'm standing on top of a bench on a Mexican sidewalk, trying to get above the stream of supporters of leftist populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador running through the streets outside of the Hilton Hotel in Mexico City. Inside, López Obrador says, "The transformation we will carry out will basically consist on kicking out corruption from our country." Online, thousands of bots are pushing pro-AMLO trending topics on Twitter and flooding Facebook News Feeds with fake news about the new president.

And now, this week, Bolsonaro has won the Brazilian general election using a toxic and perfectly social media-optimized mix of evangelism, nationalism, and strongman posturing to create a cult of personality that threatens to send the country back into a military dictatorship. It seems like he's settled on using WhatsApp as his online propaganda tool of choice. In the final days before the second vote, it was revealed that Brazilian marketing firms have been using WhatsApp to flood voters' phones with anti-leftist propaganda. Then he announced in a Facebook video several days later that if he becomes president, he aims to change a rule created by WhatsApp that limits the number of simultaneous messages a user can send at once.

But it really doesn't matter what country you're in. The dance is the same everywhere you go.

Chances are, by now, your country has some, if not all, of the following. First off, you probably have some kind of local internet troll problem, like the MAGAsphere in the US, the Netto-uyoku in Japan, Fujitrolls in Peru, or AK-trolls in Turkey. Your trolls will probably have been radicalized online via some kind of community for young men like Gamergate, Jeuxvideo.com ("videogames.com") in France, ForoCoches ("Cars Forum") in Spain, Ilbe Storehouse in South Korea, 2chan in Japan, or banter Facebook pages in the UK.

Then far-right influencers start appearing, aided by algorithms recommending content that increases user watch time. They will use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to transmit and amplify content and organize harassment and intimidation campaigns. If these influencers become sophisticated enough, they will try to organize protests or rallies. The mini fascist comic cons they organize will be livestreamed and operate as an augmented reality game for the people watching at home. Violence and doxxing will follow them.

Some of these trolls and influencers will create more sophisticated far-right groups within the larger movement, like the Proud Boys, Generation Identity, or Movimento Brasil Livre. Or some will reinvigorate older, more established far-right or nationalist institutions like the Nordic Resistance Movement, the Football Lads Alliance, United Patriots Front, or PEGIDA.

While a far-right community is building in your country, a fake news blitz is usually raging online. It could be a rumor-based culture of misinformation, like the localized hoaxes that circulate in countries like India, Myanmar, or Brazil. Or it could be the more traditional "fake news" or hyperpartisan propaganda we see in predominantly English-speaking countries like the US, Australia, or the UK.

Typically, large right-wing news channels or conservative tabloids will then take these stories going viral on Facebook and repackage them for older, mainstream audiences. Depending on your country's media landscape, the far-right trolls and influencers may try to hijack this social-media-to-newspaper-to-television pipeline. Which then creates more content to screenshot, meme, and share. It's a feedback loop.

Populist leaders and the legions of influencers riding their wave know they can create filter bubbles inside of platforms like Facebook or YouTube that promise a safer time, one that never existed in the first place, before the protests, the violence, the cascading crises, and endless news cycles. Donald Trump wants to Make American Great Again; Bolsonaro wants to bring back Brazil's military dictatorship; Shinzo Abe wants to recapture Japan's imperial past; Germany's AFD performed the best with older East German voters longing for the days of authoritarianism. All of these leaders promise to close borders, to make things safe. Which will, of course, usually exacerbate the problems they're promising to disappear. Another feedback loop.

Alex Stamos, Facebook's former chief security officer, published a piece in August saying that it was already too late for Facebook to protect the 2018 US midterm elections from misinformation campaigns from Russia and Iran. Maybe we'll fix it by 2020. There's also a chance that, for more developed countries - or for the richer citizens - things will stabilize.

In most countries, reliable publications are going behind paywalls. More services like Amazon Prime and Netflix are locking premium entertainment behind subscriptions. Which means all of this - the trolls, the abuse, the fake news, the conspiracy videos, the data leaks, the propaganda - will eventually stop being a problem for people who can afford it.

Which will most likely leave the poor, the old, and the young to fall into an information divide. This is already happening. A study released this month from the UK found that poorer British readers got less, worse news than wealthier readers. And according to a new study by Pew Research Center, only 17% of people over the age of 65 were able to identify fact from opinion. Teenage Instagram wellness communities are already transforming into mini Infowars-style snake oil empires.

There are deserts of information where normal people are algorithmically served memes, poorly aggregated news articles, and YouTube videos without any editorial oversight or regulation. Fact-checkers in Brazil complained this month ahead of the election that most voters trust what their friends and family send them on WhatsApp over what they see on TV or in newspapers.

But this sort of optimistic American ransacking in the name of technological progress isn't particularly new, especially for a country like Brazil. There's a town in the north of the country called Fordlândia. It was built in the 1920s by Henry Ford. Ford was trying to figure out a way around Britain's rubber monopoly. He made a deal with the Brazilian state of Pará for 2.5 million acres. Pará would get 9% of his profits and all of Ford's exports would be tax-exempt.

Local newspapers were extremely excited that Ford was coming. The Ford company promised fair wages. Workers started flocking from across the country to come work and live in Fordlândia.

The entire project was an immediate disaster in almost every conceivable way. The Ford company had built Fordlândia to look like an American town and fed their employees American food, all of which the new Brazilian employees hated. The town managers tried to ban alcohol, women, tobacco, and football. Workers started smuggling contraband into the town. Then workers started contracting yellow fever and malaria. The Ford managers had no idea how to grow rubber trees in tropical climates. Most of their trees ended up dying of blight or were ravaged by parasites.

By the 1930s, workers started revolting. Managers were chased into the jungle. The Brazilian military eventually had to intervene. The town was finally abandoned by 1934. The Ford company eventually learned how to make synthetic rubber and realized they didn't need Brazilian rubber at all. The town laid in ruins until 2017, when a nearby municipality decided to try and transform it into a functioning town.

The social media Fordlândias happening all over the world right now probably won't last. The damage they cause probably will. The democracies they destabilize, the people they radicalize, and the violence they inspire will most likely have a long tail. Hopefully, though, it won't take us a hundred years to try to actually rebuild functioning societies after the corporations have moved on.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On Sunday, far-right evangelical Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we've done. Posted on October 28, 2018, at 6:35 p.m.