Precision Targeting

Does something in your neighborhood Facebook group or favorite fandom Subreddit really get you spun up about something political? Maybe it was supposed to.

The new disinformation being peddled by foreign nations aims not just at swing states, but also at specific districts within them, and at particular ethnic and religious groups within those districts. The more targeted the disinformation is, the more likely it is to take hold, according to researchers and academics who have studied the new influence campaigns.

“When disinformation is custom-built for a specific audience by preying on their interests or opinions, it becomes more effective,” said Melanie Smith, the research director for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization based in London. “In previous elections, we were trying to determine what the big false narrative was going to be. This time, it is subtle polarized messaging that strokes the tension.”

Iran in particular has spent its resources setting up covert disinformation efforts to draw in niche groups. A website titled “Not Our War,” which aimed to draw in American military veterans, interspersed articles about the lack of support for active-duty soldiers with virulently anti-American views and conspiracy theories. Other sites included “Afro Majority,” which created content aimed at Black Americans, and “Savannah Time,” which sought to sway conservative voters in the swing state of Georgia. In Michigan, another swing state, Iran created an online outlet called “Westland Sun” to cater to Arab Americans in suburban Detroit.

Sowing discord on the social media channels of opposing nations is becoming an art form.

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Info Flow

"It isn’t necessary to buy politicians if you can launder narratives through the information ecosystem and have politicians repeat them."

There's a weird pattern to information churn, especially in the Very Online Right, these days.

Stuff gets posted in Facebook groups or forums or wherever, and the various influencers, podcasters, vloggers, et cetera trawl these spaces to find stuff that's generating buzz or is outlandish enough that it will draw clicks. 

Then these social media influencers amplify it, generally in as clickbait-y a way as possible, to grab eyeballs and ad revenue. This causes it to buzz even more on social media and it gets noticed by staffers in various politicians' offices, who pass on to their bosses that "People seem to really be riled up about this. You need to jump on this bandwagon!"

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"Are your glasses doxxing me?"

The pace of technological change comes at you fast, and it has a lot of implications that may not be immediately apparent.

Take these seemingly unrelated facts:

• High-resolution digital cameras are tiny and ubiquitous.
• Bluetooth, WiFi, and 5G connectivity is portable and everywhere.
• Facial recognition technology continues to advance by leaps and bounds.
• Everybody's in some sort of database these days.

Now, this caused a stink recently when people were using Meta's smart glasses to doxx random people via facial recognition, but there's no need to be using funky prototype smart glasses when your phone has a camera and the ability to locate and lock on to faces and you could theoretically, I dunno, just carry it backwards in your shirt pocket...

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Don't Get Played

A BBC News look at Russian social media influence ops:

But before the truth could even get its shoes on, the lie had gone viral. Influencers had already picked up the false story and spread it widely.

One X user, the pro-Russia, pro-Donald Trump activist Jackson Hinkle, posted a link seen by more than 6.5m people. Several other accounts spread the story to millions more X users – at least 12m in total, according to the site’s metrics.

It was a fake story, on a fake news website, designed to spread widely online, with its origins in a Russia-based disinformation operation BBC Verify first revealed last year - at which point the operation appeared to be trying to undermine Ukraine’s government.

Remember, if it makes you feel a surge of anger, or a surge of elation at having your biases confirmed, you might want to do a bit more digging into its veracity.

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From Elsewhere...

Very Online Right Wing Weirdos: “Those guys were feds! Absolute glowies!”

Normal People: “How can you tell?”

Very Online Right Wing Weirdos: “Their fashy haircuts, butch sunglasses, and tactical pants!”

Normal People: *look directly into camera*

Too Much Scooby Doo.

Unreal

It's like the entire business model of the Fox News Cinematic Universe and the entire larger constellation of Right wing social media grifters is finding dumb stuff to get not-very-bright people extremely agitated about.

Today's is especially silly.

That didn't take long.

The usual suspects are already in full "ship fuel can't melt steel beams" mode at Gab 2.0, I see.

Make your answer in the form of a question.

You know, in retrospect I'm kinda sad that we didn't get more Aaron Rodgers as a host on Jeopardy!, especially as his orbit has gotten increasingly far out there.

Can you imagine this?

Contestant: "I'll take 'People Who've Walked on the Moon' for $400, Aaron."

Aaron: "It's a hoax, you sheeple!"

Contestant: "Okay, then, give me 'Famous Vaccine Inventors' for $200?"

Aaron: "AAAARGH!!!" *rips up note cards*

Later:

Aaron: "And for Final Jeopardy, 'The water is turning the frogs' this. You have thirty seconds." 

Music: 🎶 Doo-do-doo-do... 🎶

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Tab Clearing...

• Russian GPS jamming out of Kaliningrad messes with Western commercial and government aircraft operating into and out of the eastern end of the Baltic.


• When heterodoxy runs amok. (Might be paywalled.)


• The surreal experience of being a guest speaker for the CIA's creative writing group.

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Meme Dump

I LOL'ed.

The Atlantic titled a story about the social media theories swirling around Kate Middleton as "QAnon for Wine Moms" and I just want to recognize greatness in title-writing when I see it.

Well played.

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Meme Dump

("Actually, unless it comes from the Tank region of France, it's just a sparkling armored fighting vehicle.")

"Four out of five dentists agree. The fifth is on Joe Rogan warning us about the conspiracy behind Big Floss." 

Social Media Wisdom

Before you take someone's opinions seriously enough to have an internet argument with them, research their online corpus to ensure they're worth taking seriously in the first place.

Half everyone's dumber than average.

Via the NYT, we hear of this Monmouth University poll:

"Just under 1 in 5 Americans believe the singer Taylor Swift is part of a covert effort to help President Joe Biden win the 2024 election.

[snip]

Just under half (46%) of the American public has heard something about Swift being part of a supposed covert government effort to help Biden win the 2024 presidential election. Just under 1 in 5 Americans (18%) believe such a conspiracy involving Swift exists."

"Wow," you say, "That's crazy!" Except it's not really that out of line with overall numbers in a land where better than one in ten agreed with the statement "The moon landings were faked" and less than six in ten agreed with "Humans evolved".

I mean, the New York Times is wringing its hands about one in five people believing in this moronic TaySway conspiracy only a few thin sheets of newsprint away from where it prints the frickin' horoscope!

We are a fundamentally unserious people, and one in five of your neighbors, at minimum, is a credulous moron.

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Can I get an "amen"?

"[T]his disaffected bloc of Americans (and the poor souls living in swing states) will have to endure months on end of extreme partisan rhetoric, negative advertising, cable news vitriol, and people losing their minds on X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok about other people’s political views and choices—all fueled by billions of dollars in unaccountable funds from wealthy sources and activist groups that are perfectly content to see the country break in two for ideological or financial gain.

[SNIP]

The only rational form of self-protection from this madness is to refuse to engage in America’s misshapen partisan politics and to instead pursue other forms of citizenship.

Focus on something other than politics. Talk with friends and colleagues about anything other than partisan divides and culture war clickbait. Turn off and disable the media and tech sources spreading partisan negativity. Turn the mind towards something positive and constructive in life rather than imbibing party propaganda designed to make people anxious, confused, angry, or vengeful."

To be knee-deep in the Very Online kulturkampf these days is to drink from a firehose of negativity and panic and anger, because that's what gets the clicks and the donations and the virality.

To see a politician's TV ad is to be bombarded with images and messages suggesting the country is on the verge of ruin unless you vote for our guy... oh, and help us save America by giving us money by texting CANDIDATE to 12345.

The effect is to keep your "fight-or-flight" reflex on constant low burn, keeping your brain simmering in a 24/7 broth of stress hormones.

Unplug from that shit. Go a week without talking to anybody about anything political. Otherwise you're going to find yourself listening to a podcaster or vlogger rambling about how the CIA Deep State is rigging Taylor Swift to make Travis win the Vaccine Bowl for Biden or whatever cockamamie nonsense is making the rounds now. If you do find yourself watching that and nodding along, you need to go outside and touch some grass, friend.

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National Enquirification Proceeding Apace

With their departed host Tucker Carlson reduced to flirting with flat eartherism to attract eyeballs and harvest clicks on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter, Fox News's prime time replacement has to get really weird to keep up.

I gotta admit, I didn't have "The MAGAverse gets assmad about the very existence of Taylor Swift" on my bingo card.

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Tab Clearing...

• "Modems, wArEz, and ANSI art: Remembering BBS life at 2400bps" I was there. It's true, all of it.


• The Strange Case of Britain's Demise


• Selling Security in Paranoid America

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QotD: Attention Economy Edition...

"Whether something is true—or, again, even plausible—is an afterthought. What matters is what will boost engagement, traffic, eyeballs. It’s the Ka-Ching theory of Truth.

Because truth and falsehood look equal in two-dimensional space, the incentive structure is all screwed up. Repeating boring truths doesn’t pay. Spewing transgressive, shocking, attention-grabbing falsehoods that get people riled up and confirm their angriest or darkest passions is where it’s at." -Jonah Goldberg

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Very Online

There's no better example of the politics of the Very Online rendering government dysfunctional than the ongoing farce that is the House GOP's attempt to elect a Speaker.

Take this howler of a quote from Keith Self, R-TX:

Bro, I hate to break it to you but most people don't know who Jim Jordan is*. If I polled twenty people at random at the corner bar, ten would probably answer "Uh... Michael Jordan's dad?"

Of the ten who did know who he was, five would think he was a seditious loon, three would think he was "okay, I guess, because at least he's a Republican?" and two would sound like this: 

When you've got thoroughly gerrymandered districts that vote R +30 or D +20 in general elections, then the primary challenge becomes the biggest threat, and the people who turn out to vote in primaries skew heavily toward the Lady In The Video demographic.

Which is why we get inane purity spirals. If you wanna keep doing cool Congressperson stuff in DC, where there are cigar bars and sushi joints, you gotta constantly defend your Right flank or risk having to go back to your day job in rural Nebraska chasing ambulances or selling insurance or whatever.

*And why should they? He's a Representative from Ohio, FFS. I'll give someone an A in Civics if they know the names of their own Representative and the Speaker of the House. They'll get an A+ if they know their whole state's House delegation, especially if it's more than five or six reps. I'll bet you can't name your whole state's House delegation. I think I can only name three or four of Indiana's nine.

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