“If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, then confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration. Many have written about this bias, and it appears to be sufficiently strong and pervasive that one is led to wonder whether the bias, by itself, might account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations."   Raymond S Nickerson

Most of us lack the education or training to cope effectively with lies and deception; and our judgement may also be compromised by inbuilt insecurity, prejudice, innate conservatism and resistance to change. We live in our own ‘filter bubble’ where we choose the 'facts' and opinions we are most comfortable with, and share these with our close friends in our own personal 'echo chamber'. 

In today's 'post-truth' world many of us have lost faith in politicians and the mainstream media, and increasingly rely for information on social media; and much of what we absorb may have little or no basis in fact. This however does not seem to deter us, in fact it can actually reinforce our beliefs and prejudices.

Moreover, when we go on line, our search engine helpfully selects things that it 'thinks' we will want to see, once again confirming our views. The social media we are addicted to also 'knows' what interests or excites us and its algorithms deliberately 'nudge' us towards more and more extreme material. The result of this pre-selection is that we are effectively isolated from uncomfortable facts or alternative points of view.

As Richard Gingras (Google News) points out, "affirmation is more satisfying than information — always has been."  

Someone’s profile and background images are stolen; their portrait is then colour-shifted and recompressed (to evade automated detection). One or more letters in the account name is changed e.g. from a lowercase 'i' to a lowercase 'l', or on '0' for an 'O' (which is easy to miss). 

Two give-aways of fake accounts are: unusual ratios (bots typically following thousands of accounts but with very few followers themselves), and bot accounts retweeting content on a dizzying assortment of topics and in a range of different languages.

This pulldown contains extracts from ‘The irresistible rise of the civilisation-state’ by Aris Roussinos which help explain the mind-set of China and Russia. “Western liberalism,” Roussinos notes, “has no answer to assertive powers that take pride in their cultural roots.”

“A spectre is haunting the liberal West: the rise of the “civilisation-state”. As America’s political power wanes and its moral authority collapses, the rising challengers of Eurasia have adopted the model of the civilisation-state to distinguish themselves from a paralysed liberal order, which lurches from crisis to crisis without ever quite dying nor yet birthing a viable successor. Summarising the civilisation-state model, the political theorist Adrian Pabst observes that “in China and Russia the ruling classes reject Western liberalism and the expansion of a global market society. They define their countries as distinctive civilisations with their own unique cultural values and political institutions.” From China to India, Russia to Turkey, the great and middling powers of Eurasia are drawing ideological succour from the pre-liberal empires from which they claim descent, remoulding their non-democratic, statist political systems as a source of strength rather than weakness, and upturning the liberal-democratic triumphalism of the late 20th century... 

In his influential 2012 book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State, the Chinese political theorist Zhang Weiwei observed with pride that “China is now the only country in the world which has amalgamated the world’s longest continuous civilization with a huge modern state… Being the world’s longest continuous civilization has allowed China’s traditions to evolve, develop and adapt in virtually all branches of human knowledge and practices, such as political governance, economics, education, art, music, literature, architecture, military, sports, food and medicine. The original, continuous and endogenous nature of these traditions is indeed rare and unique in the world.” Unlike the ever-changing West, constantly searching after progress and reordering its societies to suit the intellectual fashions of the moment, Weiwei observes that “China draws on its ancient traditions and wisdoms,” and its return to pre-eminence is the natural result...

The appeal of the civilisation-state model is not limited to China. Under Putin, the other great Eurasian empire, Russia, has publicly abandoned the Europe-focused liberalising projects of the 1990s — a period of dramatic economic and societal collapse driven by adherence to the policies of Western liberal theorists — for its own cultural sonderweg or special path of a uniquely Russian civilisation centred on an all-powerful state. In a 2013 address to the Valdai Club, Putin remarked that Russia “has always evolved as a state‑civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state‑civilisation model that has shaped our state polity.”... 

Whereas the rising civilisation-states of Eurasia define themselves against the liberal West, the West, and Europe, struggle to define their own very natures, and place greater intellectual emphasis on deconstructing it than on defending it: an urge that is, like the impetus to deny the existence of civilisations as bounded entities, itself ironically a unique marker of our own civilisation. Perhaps a civilisation is merely an empire that survived through and past the age of nation states, yet it is nation states, carved from the bloody wreckage of past empires, that define modern Europe. Perhaps Guy Verhofstadt, the risible butt of Brexiteer mirth, was right after all when he observed that “the world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order that is based on empires”... 

Even within the American empire, the collapse of US power abroad and the growing disfavour with which European civilisation is held in the United States itself do not bode well for the longterm survival of a coherent Western civilisation. If the West, like liberalism, is at this stage merely a justifying ideology for the American empire, then we will be forced to replace it with something else soon enough. It is precisely this problem of determining what that replacement will be that will define Britain and Europe’s politics for the rest of our lifetimes. Europe’s ageing liberal ideologues, the fading 1968 generation which has dominated our politics for so long, do not appear to have answers for these questions; indeed, they do not even seem to realise, even now, that these questions exist...

In the new age of the civilisation-state, perhaps the greatest challenge to our social harmony will come not from the challengers beyond our cultural borders, but from the battle within them to define who and what they defend.”

This pulldown presents the conclusions of a report from the Oxford Internet Institute and entitled ‘Industrialized Disinformation’: 

“The manipulation of public opinion over social media remains a critical threat to democracy. Over the past four years, we have monitored the global organization of social media manipulation by governments and political parties, and the various private companies and other organizations they work with to spread disinformation. Our 2020 report highlights the recent trends of computational propaganda across 81 countries and the evolving tools, capacities, strategies, and resources used to manipulate public opinion around the globe.” It goes on to identify three key trends in this year’s inventory of disinformation activity:

1. Cyber troop activity continues to increase around the world. This year, we found evidence of 81 countries using social media to spread computational propaganda and disinformation about politics. This has increased from last years’ report, in which we identified 70 countries with cyber troop activity.

2. Over the last year, social media firms have taken important steps to combat the misuse of their platforms by cyber troops. Public announcements by Facebook and Twitter between January 2019 and November 2020 reveal that more than 317,000 accounts and pages have been removed by the platforms. Nonetheless, almost US $10 million has still been spent on political advertisements by cyber troops operating around the world. 

3. Private firms increasingly provide manipulation campaigns. In our 2020 report, we found firms operating in forty-eight countries, deploying computational propaganda on behalf of a political actor.  Since 2018 there have been more than 65 firms offering computational propaganda as a service. In total, we have found almost US $60 million was spent on hiring these firms since 2009.

The report’s main conclusion is that “industrialized disinformation has become more professionalized, and produced on a large scale by major governments, political parties, and public relations firms.”

In 2013, a group of experts on digital law convened in Tallinn, Estonia, and wrote the Tallinn Manual, which is the closest thing to digital Geneva Conventions that the world currently has. This defines the characteristics of a cyberattack, including targeting and disabling critical infrastructure, hitting health care facilities, destroying transportation corridors or vehicles containing people, and attempts to penetrate the computer networks of opposing military forces. 

The original version of the Manual was less clear about disinformation campaigns and hacking elections, but it did deem interference in a foreign country’s elections a violation of state sovereignty if it included an attempt at regime change. And the evidence of such activities in a growing number of countries is mounting up...