2018-01: Interpreting Events & Keeping Up With Developments

We've been overwhelmed by publications on fake news / post truth politics. This page identifies some 30 books alone.

The online public is frequently wrong, sometimes very wrong, about key global issues and features of the population in their country. This is the finding of Ipsos MORI’s latest Perils of Perception survey across 38 countries. Great Britain fares better than most, but we’re still some way behind the leading (best-informed) nations, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The worst on Ipsos’ Misperception Index are South Africa, Brazil and The Philippines. Also discussed in mind control, tackling 'useful enemies' and the question of trust.

Virtually every day we hear disturbing stories in the press about Russia interfering in Western politics, using fake news and a range of other nasty techniques to mislead and confuse the public. Today it’s “British citizens at risks from deadly diseases” because “the Kremlin is using the same techniques of misinformation over flu jabs and the MMR measles vaccine” (headline in The Express). But what about Western dirty tricks?

Vitaly Bespalov was once one of hundreds of Russians employed to pump out misinformation online at the Internet Research Agency , Putin’s troll factory in St Petersburg. His story was told this week on the BBC's Profile * and also on NCB News.

The IRA, it appears, is housed in a four-story concrete building on Savushkina Street in St Petersburg, which is “secured by camouflaged guards and turnstiles.” There, bloggers and former journalists work “around the clock to create thousands of incendiary social media posts and news articles to meet specific quotas.” Those on the third level blog to undermine Ukraine and promote Russia; those on the first, to create news articles that refer to these blog. Workers on the third and fourth floor post comments on the stories and other sites under fake identities, pretending they were from Ukraine. And the marketing team on the second floor weaves all of this misinformation into social media.

Even though each floor works on material the other created, according to Vitaly "they don't have any contact with each other inside the building except for in the cafeteria or on smoke breaks…"

The Oxford Internet Institute has been studying "the purposeful distribution of misleading information over social media networks", and in July released a working paper on the topic which argues that computational propaganda (as it is known) is today "one of the most powerful new tools against democracy." The report makes chilling reading. It is based on research across 9 countries (Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine & the US) carried out “during scores of elections, political crises, and national security incidents.”

Among the study's main findings are that “in authoritarian countries, social media platforms are a primary means of social control”, and in democracies, they are “actively used for computational propaganda either through broad efforts at opinion manipulation or targeted experiments on particular segments of the public." In every country, it says, "we found civil society groups trying, but struggling, to protect themselves and respond to active misinformation campaigns.”

“The most powerful forms of computational propaganda involve both algorithmic distribution and human curation—bots and trolls working together… learning from and mimicking real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of platforms and device networks... One person, or a small group of people, can use an army of political bots on Twitter to give the illusion of large-scale consensus... Regimes use political bots, built to look and act like real citizens, in efforts to silence opponents and to push official state messaging. Political campaigns, and their supporters, deploy political bots—and computational propaganda more broadly—during elections in attempts to sway the vote or defame critics. Anonymous political actors harness key elements of computational propaganda such as false news reports, coordinated disinformation campaigns, and troll mobs to attack human rights defenders, civil society groups, and journalists.”

The paper concludes that social media firms “may not be creating this nasty content, but they are the platform for it. They need to significantly redesign themselves if democracy is going to survive.” In this respect it is good to see Google announcing (21 Nov) that it is going to ‘derank’ stories from Kremlin-owned publications RT ( Russia Today ) and Sputnik in response to allegations about Russia meddling in western democracies. Not surprising the Kremlin says it is incensed by the move, and denies any knowledge of the activities of the St Petersburg troll factory. It has suggested that reports that it exists might be fake.

Apparently Vitaly Bespalov no longer believes anything he reads on social media. It would be helpful if more people could adopt this attitude -- and the social media platforms do more to remove the poison from people's phones and desk tops.

One can't help wondering where Vitaly is today, we assume he’s in hiding — that is, if he’s a real person and not the product of a fertile western imagination/dirty trick.

*  The actually BBC profiled the man accused of funding the St Petersburg troll factory, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who, as it says "has moved from jail to restaurateur and close friend of President Putin, but precious little is known about his personal life."

Prime Minister Theresa May accuses Russia of “carrying out cyber espionage,” “meddling in elections” and trying to "undermine free societies." She was addressing business leaders at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in London. Putin, she said, was "planting fake stories" to "sow discord in the West". Russia could be a valuable partner, May said, but only if it "plays by the rules". Also, material by Cairan Martin and Jared Cohen.

The main backer behind Russia’s main ‘troll factory,’ the ‘Internet Research Agency’ (IRA), has just been revealed by CNN following an in-depth investigation. He’s oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is in the Kremlin's inner circle, and known in the Russian Press as President Putin ‘Chef’.

Last year Mozilla* launched an open source initiative to document and explain what’s happening to the health of the Internet. Its report, published earlier in the year, is both fascinating and disturbing . It explores five main issues: 1) how open is the internet? 2) who is welcome online? 3) who controls the internet? 4) is it safe and secure? and 5) who can succeed online?

In 2017 the proportion of adults in the UK consuming news online exceeded those who watched TV news (74% versus 69%). This was one of many interesting facts contained in a POSTnote [No 559], ‘Online Information & Fake News’, published in July by the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology.

How do teenagers get their news, and more importantly, can they distinguish fact from fiction? These were the questions posed by the BBC’s Media Editor, Amol Rajan, in a recent article. He asked teenagers at Cardinal Wiseman school in Birmingham, if they could tell whether three stories he told them were true or fake.