Pomerantsev, P. (2019)

Pomerantsev, P. (2019). ''This is not propaganda. Adventures in the War Against Reality.'' Faber & Faber.


 * (18) Disinformation structure in Manila: ‘chief architects’ of the ‘disinformation architecture’, the ‘influencers’: “online comedians who, in between posting the latest jokes, made fun of opposing politicians for a fee”.
 * (30) Manila. ”First, their credibility had been attacked, then they had been intimidated. With their reputations undermined, the virtual attacks were turning into real arrest warrants.”
 * (36) Russia. “No one who worked at the farm described themselves as trolls. Instead, they talked about their work in the passive voice (‘a piece was written’, ‘a comment was made’). Most treated the farm as if it was just another job, doing the minimum required and then clocking off.”
 * (39) Lyudmilla Savchuk revealed the farms. “But instead of an outcry she found that many people, including fellow activists, just shrugged at the revelations. ... the very existence was seen as normal in itself.”
 * (74) Mexico. “Protests grew as the communication between users increased online, forming a dense lattice of interconnections – what computer scientists know as ‘capillarity’. ... He [Alberto Escorcia] found that every wave of protests had a certain amount of words that made the lattice of communication thicker, words that worked almost like magical magnets powering capillarity.”
 * (76) Smear campaign against the protesters. “... the little nodes representing the protesters would stop interacting with each other and instead turn outwards to engage the attackers, and as they did so the thick lattice became thinner and the ball started to break apart into a shapeless, twitching mess.”
 * (81) “For seventy years Mexico had been a one-party state in which ‘truth’ had been dictated top-down. People had accepted the reality the regime imposed on them as normal. Today bots, trolls and cyborgs could create the simulation of a climate of opinion, of support or hate, which was more insidious, more all-enveloping than the old broadcast media. And this simulation would then become reinforced as people modified their behaviour to fall in line with what they thought was reality. ... It is not the case that one online account changes someone’s mind; it’s that en masse they create an ersatz reality.”
 * (93) Infokrieg group. “... where you will be given a status depending on how many followers you have: twenty-five to a hundred makes you a ‘Baron’; over 10,000 means you are ‘an Uebermensch Influencer’. You will then read up on different campaign tactics: how to coordinate online in order to taunt ‘mainstream’ journalists (known as ‘sniper missions’); how to post nasty comments on the Facebook pages of politicians; and how to plan ‘dislike’ campaigns on YouTube, where you ‘vote down’ videos of your opponents. If you get into a ‘dogfight’ with the enemy – a debate you can’t win, for example – then you post the hashtah #Air Support and / other Infokrieg members will come to your aid, spamming the conversation with their taunts.”
 * (110) Igor Ashmanov. “Information, in his worldview, precedes essence. First you have an information warfare aim, then you create an ideology to fit it. Whether the ideology is right or wrong is irrelevant; it just needs to serve a tactical function.”
 * (112) “In this vision all information becomes, as it is for military thinkers, merely a means to undermine an enemy, a tool to disrupt, delay, confuse, subvert. There is no room for arguments; ideals are in and of themselves irrelevant.”
 * (140) Russian-Ukrainian war. “What actually happened on the ground was almost irrelevant; the two governments just needed enough footage to back their respective stories. ... military operations are now handmaidens to the more important information effect.”
 * (158) The current rejection of objectivity “plays on ideas that originally championed ‘liberal’ causes”: “if reality is malleable, why can’t they introduce their own versions too? And if feelings are emancipatory, why can’t they invoke their own? With the idea of objectivity discredited, the grounds on which one could argue against them rationally disappears [sic].”
 * (161) Walter Quattrociocchi “found that the longer a discussion continued, the more extreme people’s comments became. ‘Cognitive patterns in echo chambers tend towards polarisation’, he concluded. This, argued Quattrociocchi, showed up the emotional structure of social media. We go online looking for the emotional boost delivered by likes and retweets. Social media is a sort of mini-narcissism engine that can never quite be satisfied, leading us to take up more radical positions to get more attention. It really doesn’t matter if stories are accurate or not, let alone impartial: you’re not looking to win an argument in a public space with a neutral audience; you just want to get the most attention from like-minded people.”
 * (166) “if the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts? ... And so the politician makes a big show of rejecting facts, who validates the pleasure of spouting nonsense, who indulges in full, anarchic liberation from coherence, from glum reality, becomes attractive.”
 * (179) “is disinformation then just the excuse we use to let ourselves off the hook – ‘We didn’t do anything because we were confused by a bot farm’?”
 * (208) “In a recent report the ISD [Institute for Strategic Dialogue] described the environment it works in as a ‘liquid’ society, invoking a world where old, more solid social roles have slipped the leash, where information moves so easily it fractures old notions of belonging, where a sense of uncertainty pervades everything and where all sorts of forces can more easily reshape you.”
 * (209) “micro-targeting, where one set of voters shouldn’t necessarily know about the others, requires some big, empty identity to unite all these different groups, something so broad these voters can project themselves onto it – a category like ‘the people’ or ‘the many’. The ‘populism’ that is thus created is not a sign of ‘the people’ coming together in a great groundswell of unity, but a consequence of ‘the people’ being more fractured than ever, of their barely existing as one nation. When people have less in common than before, you have to reimagine a new version of ‘the people’”
 * (210) “Facts become secondary in this logic. After all, you are not trying to win an evidence-driven debate about ideological concepts in the public sphere; your aim is to seal in your audience behind a verbal wall. It’s the opposite of ‘centrism’, where you have to bring everyone together in one big tent, smooth out differences. Here the different groups don’t even need to meet each other. Actually, it might be better if they don’t: what if one perceives the other as their enemy? To seal this improvised identity one needs an enemy: ‘the non-people’. Best to keep it too as abstract as possible so anyone can invent their own version of what it means ...”
 * (212) Thomas Borwick. “His job is ... to connect individual causes to his campaign, even if that connection might feel somewhat tenuous at first.”
 * (213) Borwick: “’I believe a well-identified enemy is probably a 20 per cent kicker to your vote’ ...”
 * (215) “... in this game the one who wins will be the one who can be most supple, rearranging the iron filings of disparate interests around new magnets of meaning.”
 * (218) The future arrived first in Russia. First the idea of a majority for Putin was invented and then it appeared. A fog of disinformation. Facts are dismissed with triumphant cynicism as ‘just PR’ or ‘information war’. (221) First a majority was created for Yeltsin.
 * (231) Changing behaviour. Nigel Oakes. “You need to work out why someone smokes, argues Oakes, if you want to stop them from doing it.” Young women smoked because they thought it made them look attractive. So focus on “how smoking makes their hair and breath stink, how it makes them unattractive.”